Hi, does anyone know the workflow for creating Stereoscopic videos ? As my understanding is to save out both the right and left camera eyes and then combine them somehow within cops or nuke ect…

Also what is the difference between Stereoscopic Active & Passive and is there a different work flow for these ??

Thanks In Advance

If you need to create a red/cyan anaglyph, you can read the image sequences into COPs and use the Anaglyph COP to combine them. Interlacing for polarized monitors can be done via the field merge COP. Other methods generally require both image sequences to be used.

Active and passive describes the way in which the 3D image is perceived from the two images. “Active” means that the 3D glasses are actively changing (shuttering), whereas passive means that the 3D glasses are always the same (one eye red, the other cyan; one eye polarized vertically, the other horizontally). This doesn't matter workflow-wise, but it will define the type of your target image (ie, red/cyan glasses require a anaglyph image, polarized glasses usually require interlaced output, shutter glasses require two separate images).

Houdini and MPlay both have display options in their viewports for viewing stereoscopic images. For Houdini, you'll need a stereo camera rig. For MPlay, you'll need two source image sequences. You can adjust how the viewport displays these, with the options being Anaglyph (red/cyan glasses needed), Interlaced and Reverse Interlaced (special monitor & polarized glasses needed) and Quad buffer stereo (Quadro card and shutter glasses needed).

Thanks for the reply, does Sidefx have an example image to use ? As i have a sony vaio 3d i would like to try this on.

Thanks In Advance

There is no example of a stereo pair images that ships with Houdini, but you can easily render out a simple scene yourself using stereo rig camera. Or you can find some stereo image pairs on the Internet.

As for viewing them in 3d in Houdini on your vaio laptop, make sure your graphics card properly supports OpenGL quad-buffer stereo. That's the only way Houdini knows how to talk to your hardware to display active glasses stereoscopic images.

You can find an old tutorial on Digital-Tutors:

Getting Started with Stereoscopy in Houdini

http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/training.php?cid=84&pid=122 [digitaltutors.com]

It's for beginners but a good approach in stereoscopy and Houdini.