3D Stereoscopic Rendering and Production

I have been fascinated with 3D Stereoscope since i was a child and experienced it for the first time, and now i am in a position to experiment and research the process to create this effect for digital 3D animation. Lately there are a lot of 3D films being shown in stereoscope, and with Sony confirming that there are getting the play station ready for the stereoscope movement i thought it was about time i learned how to do this also. With the 3ds max video Post function you can create stereoscope animations directly within 3Ds Max. Video Post calculates each frame for both cameras and uses an alpha mask to combine the two images to an interlaced picture. It's best to use an uncompressed video format, like FLC, to avois comression artefacts, which often distray the interlaced image structure.

To create a stereo panorama, place a stereo cam pair into the center of your scene. Turn the cameras to at least 12 or 16 positions and take one picture for each camera. You now can use a stitcher program such as PhotoVista or Apple's QTVR Authoringstudio to create the two panorama images. Now use any Plugin to combine these two pictures into an interlaced one.

Example 1.

I created some basic geometry in the scene just for the purpose of this experiment, to use as a demonstration in the development process of rendering out a stereoscopic 3D frame.

Below you can see  a 6 strip animatic of the process for creating one single frame, without using a render element of Zdept

Here is frame one, rendering out using a scanline render, with only the 3ds max basic lighting

Here is the ZDepth render element of the same frame

And finally a 3d stereoscopic frame.