Nanyang Polytechnic students developing stereoscopic short

When 3D stereoscopic is becoming such a hype and so many studios are turning their way to the next big thing, why should the students be left behind, right? Nanyang Polytechnic recently conducted a one week workshop on 3D Stereoscopy for its students to learn 3D and live action stereoscopy and its integration.

The students were taught how to shoot the live action footage meant for stereoscopy, as well the the process of compositing involved to get the stereoscopic output. At the end of the workshop, the students made 4 stereoscopic clips with live action, complete CG, and CG cum live action footage.

The students are now working on their own stereoscopic clip. They will finish the animation, texturing and shading this week. The students started to render the first shot and will render more and more shots progressively the next 2 weeks. Talking to Animation Xpress Asia Pacific, Jacques Frety shared "The workshop was very ambitious. Covering live action, CG, and integration in 1 week was very challenging. Especially the integration part, for which it was required to insert CG elements with live action shots. That's why we didn't expect to obtain perfect results but it was important that the students master the process."   

Clyde continued, "Undertaking an awareness workshop in stereoscopic 3D at Nanyang Polytechnic is testament to the motivation and drive that is there in Singapore. I initially discussed the workshop with Prof Jacques Frety at the Nanyang Polytechnic, who was very enthusiastic. The students actually gave up their term break holidays to attend the week long workshop with the support of the SIDM's management."

The experience was great, working with these young animation graduates. I look forward to visiting them again soon. This Stereo 3D workshop 'graduating' class has already begun to think in 3D and have now actively taken the lead in further developing their knowledge base and skills."

Jacques shared, "Day one, we had a kind of a conference for the students and the staff to explain the history of stereoscopy. In the afternoon we started working on a CG short using Maya, and it was good using Maya because you can see the camera and then we used it in the compositing software. Clyde who is an expert in live action stereoscopy took us to shoot outside and taught the format and the system of screening. Clyde came down with his own camera, camera rig and shot outside and taught the students how to clean it in the compositing software and re-align it. The pipeline for stereo- live action was taught on the second day.

Next day we shoot in the morning and composited 3D objects in the live action shot. After that was a new integration, we took a live action shot of the students running in the stadium and integrated the 3D robot with it and it was more challenging because they have to be at the same depth. Last day we finished everything and made our presentation to show what we did in one week."    

"The shot included students running with the CG robot. It actually felt like the robot was with the students because of the depth. It is very interesting to match 3D with live action because they have to work a lot with zero parallax, it means that we have a screen. After we created the shots, we took a CG robot shot from the internet from a classic 3D movie and not from stereo, and the goal was that if we used exactly the same camera, same animation and we render it in stereo it would not work.

It was interesting for the students that if they work in stereo, you have to take care of the stereo when you create your camera, your animation." He added

Talking about the stereoscopic facility at NYP, Jacques shared "We can not imagine better facilities. First we have a theatre with stereo projection with passive glasses.This is a very good asset to validate our shots. For the computer we had to invest to be able to create HD-3D easily and fast. HD and 3D request a lot of memory. That is why we bought new 64bits computers with 16 GB of RAM. For the display we decided to work with the Nvidia 3Dvision system, with HD-3D monitors that we will receive in a few days. For the software we work with Maya. For the compositing we work with Shake, but for the next projects we will work with Nuke with Occula, which are the best tools for stereo compositing."