3 Ways to Render 3D Source Art from CG Programs

Special thanks again to Neil Nathanson for creating this for our demo and explaining the process from a CG artist's point of view.

There are a few ways to setup your CGI scene for smooth lenticular output:

1 - Animate a single camera moving across the scene. By animating the camera and moving it horizontally across the scene, (in video terms a pan across), you can generate the right number of frames and easily output them as an animation sequence of still images. You can easily test different ranges of parallax by adjusting the total width of the movement. Be sure you keep the camera movement perpendicular to the camera itself and note you usually want to render the total image wider than the final size since when aligning the image to place the zero point you will need to crop a part of each image.

2 - Create an array of virtual cameras and render one image from each camera. In this case you clone your first camera and move it horizontally a few units, then repeat to make a camera for each frame in the shot. The advantage to this approach is you can preview stereo pairs right on screen in your viewports and prior to rendering to get an idea of the depth effect via free-viewing or a stereo viewing aid such as a pokescope. Also once you have this "Virtual Lenticular Camera Group" you can reuse it in other scenes as well.

3 - Use a turntable approach with one camera and spinning your scene as if it were on a turntable. This approach is best for objects when you plan to add a background later, since the background would move too much and create parallax that is too wide. Place the camera aimed at the center of the objects and spin the objects as an animation over a set number of frames. The center of the pivot for the spin will define the zero point which is right at the plane of the paper so it is easy to control positioning of the objects in space. If you want to move the object forward, move the pivot point of the object backward so more of the scene is in front of the zero point. You can test different degrees of parallax by adjusting the amount of the spin.

Note: This is advanced technique. If you don't have a 3D program, or you are starting with 2D "flat" art we can build your art using a depth map, which we show and discuss in the 2D to 3D Conversion blog article from December.