3D Phantogram video in Autodesk Maya aka. PhantoFlick

By , January 28, 2010 1:33 pm

I have been experimenting with making Phantograms movies in Autodesk Maya. A phantogram is a type of stereoscopic image that has a perspectival anamorphosis. You could think of a Phantogram as a stereoscopic forced perspective image. I like to call Phantogram movies PhantoFlicks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantogram

My Phantogram Video of tumbling coins in 3D:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCoHM7VZOtY&fmt=22

My technique is to use Autodesk Maya to create a pair of stereoscopic cameras angled at 45 degrees downward facing, centered on the grid in the scene. The cameras are converged using the Film Offset channels.

I render the images to disk using the name.number.extension naming convention.

At this point, the footage looks like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfx8rZLZ6QY&fmt=22
Then the rendered image sequences are loaded into a new scene with the identical two cameras set up at the same location. I re-project the left images then the right images onto a ground plane using two Maya surface shader materials. The left and right renderings are loaded as .IFF formatted image sequences.

Then I set up a 2nd camera rig with the same camera separation and convergence pointing straight down towards the ground plane (-90 on the X axis). The cameras are moved upward on the Y axis until the non-wrapped part of the projected textures fill the frame.

Next I batch render the left camera images and then the right images with the name.number.extension naming convention.

The final images are then composited in Apple Shake. I view an interactive anaglyph preview as I fine tune the images. Then I create the side-by-side formatted movie that YouTube's Stereoscopic Player likes.

Next I upload the finished video to YouTube with the yt3d:enable=true tag on the video so it will play with the new YouTube Stereoscopic 3D player.

For more information on displaying 3D content in YouTube:
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=157640

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