How do you make a Polarized 3D Film (CGI scenes)?

J

Josh R

New member
Okay,

A) I DO NOT want to make a Red-Cyan lens film.

B) I am talking about films like 'Avatar', and 'Alice In Wonderland'.

C) I know very well that to FILM something like these two films requires some kind of REALLY EXPENSIVE camera with insane polarised lenses..

D) When you see the complete computer generated imagery scenes in these 3D films (for example, 'Avatar' shows the world of Pandora with an establishing shot - THIS REQUIRES NO FOOTAGE FROM ANY INSANE CAMERAS, EH?) All it is, is straight up CGI!

So this means that 3D CAN, in fact, be accomplished if you're handy with 3D-modeling tools on the computer (Maya, 3DSMAX, C4D, Blender etc.)

Does anyone know how to do it though? Tutorial???

Thanks in advance,
Josh
 
In theory you don't need a super expensive camera setup, all you need is two cameras. To get the 3D effect you film the scene with the two cameras slightly offset from each other. One camera acts as your left eye, the other camera acts as your right eye. If doing it in CGI you simply use two virtual cameras. So yeah, the filming isn't too much of an issue. Well, that's not exactly true; GOOD filming is quite hard as you have many more aspects to consider in your cinematography. But I digress.

The big challenge is playing the movie back to someone. In order to get the 3D effect you need to make it so the viewer's left eye only sees the footage from the left camera and the right eye only sees the footage from the right camera. In the old days they did this with the red/blue glasses. The technology for avatar polarizes the light for one eye in one direction and the light for the other eye in the other direction, and then uses polarized glasses to filter out the image for each eye. To make this setup you need to have two projectors with polarizers, and a screen that preserves light polarization (light unpolarizes after bouncing off something). You also need software that will feed the video to each projector (it exists, but I can't remember the name off the top of my head). All of this is quite expensive, and beyond my knowledge. I'd suggest you google "making a 3d projector" or "making a 3d movie".
 
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