Friday 10 September 2010

CryEngine Anaglyph 3D Movie

After considerable fiddling I appear to have produced an anaglyph 3D movie generated from CryENGINE.


The movie was produced by creating a camera path in Sandbox, running the camera in an out-dolly along the path at 1/8 of its full speed and using Camstudio to capture the results as an AVI (if only AVI output wasn't broken in Sandbox).  The master AVI was exported to an image sequence (5300 frames) using VirtualDub.  The frame sequences were then duplicated (one for left eye and one for right eye) and, through trial and error, a step mismatch was introduced to simulate the view from parallel camera tracks.  It worked out that a mismatch of 10 frames created a good stereo effect.  The mismatched image sequences were then combined to produce a single anaglyph AVI using Masuji Suto's excellent Stereo Movie Maker.

Does it work?  Most of my colleagues can see the 3D effect, so I guess it does.  Improvements required are a higher native resolution (I've upscaled this to 720p from the original 360) a more adventurous camera path and and some work refining the simulated parallel camera paths (requiring a higher frame-rate for the video capture to enable more subtlty in creating the mismatch).