Laxton Castle, CryENGINE Anaglyph 3D

Trying to short-cut the anaglyph movie workflow, this short movie of the Laxton Castle game/model uses a single video stream duplicated within Stereo Movie Maker to provide left and right video channels and with the stereo effect created simply by tweaking the registration of the two channels.  It seems to work quite well, although mis-registration is perhaps a little overdone.  Anyway, enough anaglyph for now.

Music "between blue sky and cubicle" by Japanese Seizure Robots on mp3unsigned.com. 

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).

CryEngine Anaglyph 3D

Anaglyph 3D in CryEngine 1 has proven surprisingly difficult to master.  The images below use the same technique as for CityScape (manual panning between captures and Takashi Sekitani's AnaMaker to generate the 3D images from two stills).  Getting the separation between images right is (obviously) crucial for producing a good stereo effect and simple trial and error is problematic.  Time to experiment with cameras in CryEngine.

Although imperfect, I do quite like these images, particularly the final one of Laxton castle looming in the virtual mist.  I wonder if access to a (simulated) third dimension increases the evocative power of the images to render landscape accessible?

Anaglyph 3D

I've always been quite keen on the slightly blurry, unreal quality of 3D images (perhaps it was that View-Master I had as a child).  It seems a shame that CityScape and CryEngine are not able to produce native 3D output (ok I know CryEngine 3 is able to in its latest iteration, but I don't have that).  After some lateral thinking and with a little experimentation it has proven relatively easy to produce convincing stereo image output, albeit manually in a rather tedious, hit-and-miss process.  For the examples below, left and right eye images were generated by manually introducing a slight tracking motion to the camera view between captured stills.  I've combined the two images using the excellent, and free, Anaglyph Maker by Takashi Sekitani (which I should add also support output for interleave shutter glasses).

These examples (which are red-cyan anaglyph and so need the funky eye-wear) are from CityScape, I'm working on similar output from CryEngine, which since it offers better camera control should make anaglyph 3D movies a possibility too.