3Delight 3D Stereoscopy

For those of you interested in creating “3D” 3D images using 3Delight, here’s a quick little starter for you. You can render from multiple cameras at the same time in the same render pass and save LOADS of rendering time while doing it.

This post will assume that you have created a stereo camera rig in Maya.

Under your 3Delight Render Pass, change the rendering camera to be the center camera, which should be something like stereoCameraCenterShape.

Now, this next step will be dependent on what kind of AOVs and displays you want to render to. In my example, I’m rendering “rgba” as well as “AO” with an alpha channel and exclusivity. In Pre World MEL under the MEL section of the render pass, tweak and add this:
RiDisplay -n "+/path/to/image/rgba_#4f.right.tif" -t "tiff" -m "rgba" -p "camera" "string" "stereoCameraRightShape";
RiDisplay -n "+/path/to/image/rgba_#4f.left.tif" -t "tiff" -m "rgba" -p "camera" "string" "stereoCameraLeftShape";
RiDisplay -n "+/path/to/image/AO_#4f.right.tif" -t "tiff" -m "color aov_AO,alpha" -p "camera" "string" "stereoCameraRightShape" -p "exclusive" "int" "1" -p "exclusive" "int" "1";
RiDisplay -n "+/path/to/image/AO_#4f.left.tif" -t "tiff" -m "color aov_AO,alpha" -p "camera" "string" "stereoCameraLeftShape" -p "exclusive" "int" "1" -p "exclusive" "int" "1";

When you render, this will render .tif files for the left and right cameras for those two AOVs. You can and should tweak this to fit what you need. Then, you can combine the two 3D images in a compositing program to create a 3D stereoscopic image.

For more information on what options you can tweak (such as pixel filters, associating alpha, etc) consult the 3Delight Studio Pro and 3Delight for Maya User Manuals. The general format for adding parameters to the Display portion of the RIB is:
-p "PARAMETER" "TYPE" "VALUE"