OTOY Forums

Hi all, hopefully someone can offer some help / tips. I'd like to use Octane for a stereo animation and I've drawn the following conclusions on some methods:

Octane Stereo: This seems like a gimmick unless I'm missing something. Can't render left and right eye separately and I can't find a way to tell if this simply rotates the cameras or whether it adjusts skewed frustrum / axis offset.

Overscan / parallel cameras: This kind of works so that I can set the convergeance in post, but there's no good way of previewing this in Max, just have to render and hope that in post it will work. This also means I have to render more of the frame than I need.

'Physical' lens: Creating a 3D lens with a specular material with correct IOR. This seems like a disaster of an idea to me for many reasons

Are there any other ways of achieving this, or am I missing something with Octane's stereo features?

I guess the issue with skewed cameras and Octane is that GPU renderers don't like this kind of non-realistic approach? Vray-RT and iRay also don't render skewed cameras.

I'd really love to work with Octane on this animation so hopefully someone can help.

I've just done a few more tests, and it seems that Octane does indeed correct the stereo images by skewing the frustrum. Seems to me this would be a perfect solution / feature if only I could render each eye separately... surely this is possible?

install xidmary plugin or create your rig.

I found that plugins like 3DHippie Stereo Cam didn't actually render properly with Octane, Octane simply takes the skewed camera and reads it as a rotated / toe in camera. Xidmary might work properly though, but I'm almost certain it would be the same. I'm working on a rig with a few scripted calculations which should work (fingers crossed) using Max's 2014 Extension Stereo tools, I'll post it here if anyone would be interested? Also if there are any Maxscripters out there who could turn the rig into a nice little script PM me and I'll send it over. At the moment the rig is fine until I rename the Stereo rig which then breaks the names references in the Float Scripts... I'm really not a Max Script guy

ok here is the rig, hopefully people will find it useful.

Some observations and notes:

The rig uses the Max 2014 Extension Stereo camera and Octane cameras.

Rig gets broken if you rename StereoCameraRig001.

You set the FOV, Interaxial and Zero Parallax in the StereoCameraRig001 object, and the FOV, x position and the lens shift x gets automatically updated in the L and R Octane cameras.

You can use the Anaglyph preview in the StereoCameraRig001 to test the scene before rendering out from the L and R Octane cameras for final output.

The Octane cameras are linked to a dummy before being linked to the StereoCameraRig001. If I link the Octane cameras directly to the StereoCameraRig001 I can no longer view through the Octane cameras and therefore am unable to render from them.

One issue seems to be that Max's Stereo tools zooms out slightly with increased disparity, I have no idea why it does this, but the Octane cameras should be mathematically correct, they just won't 100% match the weird Max Stereo cameras, but should be close enough.

Hopefully someone can take this and improve on it, I'm useless at Maxscript. The main equation needed to turn the FOV, Interaxial and Zero Parallax into a lens shift ratio is:

Right Eye:
-$StereoCameraRig001.Interaxial_Separation/2/(2*$StereoCameraRig001.Zero_Parallax*TAN($CenterCamera001.FOV/2))

Left Eye:
$StereoCameraRig001.Interaxial_Separation/2/(2*$StereoCameraRig001.Zero_Parallax*TAN($CenterCamera001.FOV/2))

Got fed up with the difference between the Max Stereo Rig and the Octane camera render with lens offset so I created another rig... feel free to download and use

This one is just using Octane cameras. You can set up the three key values, FOV, Interaxial and Zero Parallax using the sliders, or you can set the Zero Parallax using the ZeroParallaxDummy.

I would have linked the values directly from the camera using Maxscript, but for some reason the Octane camera controllers have $fStop for setting the fStop value, and also $fStop for setting the stereo control (screengrab attached along with the Max scene). So this way everything is set from the sliders and Max doesn't get too confused.

Hi Mike
I just updated my max2OctaneCamera script to support the stereo camera plugin in max 2014.
the script creates one camera each time, so you'll need to pick the left camera, press create then pick the right camera and press create to make two cameras.
the script can be downloaded from my camera correction trick thread, hope it helps.

akira.

great thanks Akira.