In a previous post, I created a camera projection from a still image.  In this post I discuss generating a stereoscopic 3D effect, also known as an anaglyph, from that camera projection.  With the use of red/blue 3D glasses, anaglyph imagery will appear as a three dimensional illusion.

For this project, we need imagery for each eye.  This is often accomplished with dual camera setups.  In this case, the image was taken with one camera.  However, since the camera projection was implemented with 3D modeling and animation software, a second camera can be added to the scene.  With Blender, adding a second camera is as easy as adding any other primitive.  For this test I duplicated the original camera and moved the copied camera a little to the right.  This was not a precision move since I really don’t know how far apart the cameras need to be separated.  However it should be sufficient for the purpose of generating an anaglyph.

Stereo Cameras in Blender

Once I have two cameras in my 3D environment, the next step is to combine the images from the two cameras to create an anaglyph.  There are many ways to create anaglyphs, but for this project I used Blender’s nodal compositor.  That’s right folks.  Blender has a node-based compositor as one of its many features.  The Blender node editor is not a general compositor in that it lacks masks, tracking, animation of parameters, etc.  It’s used for internal compositing of render passes and for doing post-processing effects on its 3D output.

Nodal Nerdiness in Blender

The node editor in Blender allows one to access the output of each camera.  Anaglyph images are created by combining the red channel from the left camera with the blue and green channels of the right camera.  With the node editor, I can separate out the color channels from each camera, and recombine them to create an anaglyph output.

If you have red/blue 3D glasses, you can check out the results of my test below.  It’s not perfect, but it does show that I’m on the right track.  For a future project, I’ll figure out how to position the cameras to yield a more realistic output.

Blender Anaglyph Test from Fourth Order Light on Vimeo.