Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/38279
n n n n Gaming Guerilla Games’ interplanetary shooter spot, you’re seeing both images [left-eye view and right-eye view], so it becomes a blur.” Big, chunky geometry, Roush has observed, works better than granular elements. “At a cer- tain point, small things in the background just turn to noise [in stereo 3D],” he remarks. From TRON’s Universe to Killzone 3’s Helghan Empire Digital Domain’s Vernon Wilbert had delved into stereo 3D before—on the TRON: Legacy movie teaser. “When working on the TRON: Legacy teaser, we started the animation in Maya, then moved it into [Autodesk’s] 3ds Max. Maya at the time did not have what it has today, which was the stereoscopic camera capability,” says Wilbert. “Now, we’re dealing with a piece of software that understands two cameras. That increased our productivity dramatically.” Beginning with Maya 2010, users have the option to activate a stereoscopic camera in the modeling window. With this function, artists can view their scenes in anaglyph mode— simultaneously looking at both the left-eye and right-eye views (they will see objects in two overlapping shades, as if they were slightly misaligned, but that is, in fact, how stereo- scopic content looks to normal eyes). “You’re dealing with another set of imag- es,” says Wilbert of stereo 3D. “But not only that, you’re also dealing with how they relate to each other. We need to be able to judge them at key points in the production line to maintain a quality.” Working in Maya, Wilbert’s team could ad- just the interaxial separation, representing the distance between the virtual lenses that create the stereo effects. “We could actually look at the shots in Maya, with the ability to tune the anaglyphic effects, convergence points, and interocular distances. That gave us the ability to create 24 June/July 2011 a first-person shooter for the Sony PS3, is the first title in the popular game series to be presented in stereo 3D and the first to embrace the new PlayStation Move motion-sensing controller. the dramatic effect we need right there, in the open scene file,” Wilbert explains. Inspired by the works and aesthetics of German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (best remembered for her controversial documen- tary Triumph of the Will), the dramatic open- ing cinematic sequence in Killzone 3 includes sweeping wide-angle shots of marches and military assemblies. Stereo 3D, Wilbert be- lieves, should be “intrinsic to the storytelling process, as opposed to something you tag on in the end. Some think of stereo as a postpro- duction process. To us, it’s part of the story.” “The careful planning of a stereo 3D pro- duction is even more important than in 2D, and, ideally, the use of depth should be ad- dressed even in previs,” observes Brad Pee- bler, president and co-founder of Luxology. “As production begins, tools like the parallax offset probe inside Luxology’s Modo software help the ‘stereo budget’ of the shot, which is the total amount of parallax offset between the foreground and back- ground.” Non-conventional 3D Since stereo 3D is a young medium and launching a brand-new title or franchise is costly, many developers and publishers may scour their ex- isting franchises for conversion to stereo 3D. But it won’t be as simple as a push- button conversion, as Roush and Wilbert have learned. Roush cautions that, while first-person shooters and role-playing games that fully commit themselves to 3D camera movement, character design, and environment (like Tomb Raider: Underworld, for instance) would work well when converted to stereo 3D, games with 2.5D and 2.75D looks (as exemplified by Bliz- zard’s Diablo series, for instance) may not fully take advantage of the simulated depth of field that is possible in stereo 3D. According to Wilbert, fire and smoke ef- fects—imagery that, in flat cinematic, you can just grab the texture from a source file and place it somewhere—would not work well in stereo 3D, unless you understand where that fire or smoke is in the 3D space, where the convergence point is. It’s not easy to come up with a formula to decide the added cost for implementing stereo 3D, Wilbert observes. “Some think, ‘Well, for stereo, just add 2 percent to the budget—or some other number.’ That’s dangerous,” he points out. “[The added workload] depends on your content, on how much live action you want to incorporate, for example. When you add live action, it adds another layer of com- plexity,” as was the case with his work on the TRON: Legacy movie teaser. The extra camera you can work with in stereo 3D, Wilbert points out, is both an op- portunity and a burden. “Be mindful of your focus point—especially if you’re following it,” he advises. “Your convergence has to play a role in [your scene], but don’t become a slave to convergence. My suggestion is to watch it.” We Need More Trucks The finished products—Killzone 3, BIT.TRIP games, and other stereo 3D titles—play on different devices, some powered by shut- ter glasses, others by a glasses-free stereo 3D display. But most development efforts are Gaijin Games is developing its 1980s-style games, currently available on the Nintendo Wii, for the portable Nintendo DS3, which has a stereo 3D display. bound to take place on personal computers. Powerful multicore workstations with profes- sional graphics cards have made it possible for developers to view game assets and animation sequences in real time. “The high-end graph- ics cards from our two GPU partners—Nvidia and AMD—have stereo output jacks,” says HP’s Tidwell. “You can connect them to your stereo glasses or stereo monitor.” If the game developer’s hardware were a K illzone 3, Bit.T r ip