Click here for my new stereo-images page. | Click here for my Pibgorn stereo-images page. | |||||||||
As Lazarus Long said about writing, committing 3D images is nothing
to be ashamed of, so long as you do it in private and wash your hands
afterward. One of the regulars on the Pibgorn comment group asked me how i converted some panels from Pibgorn to 3D, and so here's a quick and dirty intro to 3D and how to do it. Are you sitting comfortably? Good. |
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HOW TO VIEW THE 3D IMAGES: These images are arranged for "crossed-eye viewing". Look at the pair of images and allow your eyes to cross slightly until the two images "fuse" into a single 3D image. (As a matter of some possible minor interest, you'll be seeing the image to the right with your left eye, and the one to the left with your right eye. Fascinating, no?) | ||||||||||
To the left is a diagram
of your eyes (well, someone's eyes, or things that vaguely resemble
eyes) and three objects. We will assume that you are primarily focusing on the middle object. When you focus on a distant object, the sight lines from your two eyes converge at that point, as shown by the dotted lines in the diagram. Objects nearer or further than the point you're focused at will appear to be shifted to the left or right in each eye's view. (Try this: point your finger at a distant object, and then close one eye and then the other without moving your hand; see how your finger seems to move to the left or right. Your finger should look unshifted in one eye; that's your "dominant" eye. For most people it's the right one. Not me, of course - a weirdo to the end.) In a 3D image, objects that have no displacement between the imagesare said to be in the "Picture Plane" - that is, the apparent surface of the page or the screen. All other objects will appear either to be behind this plane, or in front of it - coming out of the frame at you, as it were. |
Notice that the object in front of the picture plane is to the right of the left eye's sightline, and to the left of that of the right eye, and vice versa for the object behind the picture plane. This is the basis of stereo photography or art. |
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Here's a simple little picture of three objects;
a triangle, a square, and a circle. You can tell that the circle is in front of the square and the square is in front of the triangle, because each blocks out part of the object behind it, and they have holes you can see the others through. We'll assume that this is the view of the three objects that your right eye will get; notice that they are in a straight line; you can look straight through the holes in all three and see the background. We'll make this the right eye view. (When you're creating a stereo image, it's usually easyist to create a basic reference image - generally the right image, because of that dominant eye thing - and then to make changes relative to it for the other eye's view. |
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Same three objects, but notice that the circle has
shifted to the right relative to the square and the triangle has shifted
left. This will be the left eye view. (These images, BTW, were created using Serif PagePlus X3, my favourite desktop publishing software, which allowed me to position the objects accurately on different layers and then export them as pictures.) |
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So, to convert the image of Dru singing, using
Paint.net,
i cut out the images of Dru, the lettering, Geoff at the piano, and the
spotlight. |
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And this is the camera rig i used to take a lot of the pictures that you can see on my new stereo page: It's pretty simple, and costs about nine bucks or less (assuming you already have a tube of silicone sealer/adhesive on hand), which is the cost of a two-pack of disposable cameras at WalMart, Dollar General or whatever; the sticks are paint-stirring paddles that you can pick up free at Home Depot or the like. This particular rig is made with a much wider inter-ocular separation than your (or my) eyes - i like to shoot in "hyper-stereo", which gives the visual effect that you're about a thirty-foot tall giant (standing in a twenty-four foot hole), and gives more apparent depth to the images. If you make one, and you'd prefer more normal stereo effect in your pitures, it isn't hard to mount the cameras so that the lens separation more closely matches your own inter-ocular diatance. Obviously, you point it at whatever you want to shoot, and press both shutter buttons simultaneously (as closely as you can). If you check the picture of Fred leBlanc, Cowboy Mouth's drummer, you'll notice that his right arm and stick look funny that's because the time lag between exposures let it move slightly between the two views. Likewise the tip of Boris the cat's tail as he stands withhis paws on the bumper of our old van. |
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The
StereoPhotomaker
program is one of several interesting programs from Masuji Suto for creating
and manipulating 3D stereo images (as opposed to the kind of "3D Objects"
one produces with Poser and other such programs); his homepage is fascinating
if you're interested in such stuff... |