I’ve been playing with colors in Photoshop to find what works to get the best 3d effect. Until I come up with an original rabbit, I’ve been using the fun rabbit seen above. The image was found through Google Images and was lovingly stolen from Suivez le lapin.  This is a great little rabbit picture and I’ve really enjoyed working with it – big kudos to the original artist(s) and hope you don’t mind your work being used for educational purposes

So below, I’ve taken the original line art image and played with the alpha channels to make the original black various colors for different anaglyphic purposes. I followed pretty closely the advice given by Mark Newbold on his GREAT Stereo 3D Stuff website. Basically, I copied the lineart into two layers, made one Cyan and the other Red. The Photoshop Blending mode “Screen” is used to combine the color information on intersecting points between the layers. For the experiments today, I’m using cheap Red/Cyan glasses that came free with Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3D (comeon… it’s Rodriguez! in 3D!! ok, ok, I should hang my head in shame…)

First up, the Rabbit with the Cyan portion to the left of the Red

With your Red/Cyan (meaning red filter over left eye and Cyan filter over right eye) glasses on, the rabbit appears behind the screen. Through the red filter, cyan appears dark and red appears light (though not white… it should be pure white and fade into the white background completely but it’s not for me… probably a mismatch between my LCD’s red and the passband of the red filter). Through the Cyan filter, red appears dark and cyan appears very white – so white that I can’t resolve any detail when looking centimeters from the monitor. So, the image that the left eye sees is to the left of the image the right eye sees. If you can imagine lines between corresponding points on the rabbit images to the position of your eyes, those lines will intersect behind the monitor, which is why the image appears to be floating behind the monitor.

Next up, the same Cyan/Red outline, only this time on a black background

Now it appears as if the rabbit is floating IN FRONT of the screen. Same principle applies here: only now the cyan blends into the background through the Red filter and the red blends into the background through the Cyan filter.  Again, imagine lines between corresponding points on the rabbit images to the position of your eyes.  This time, those lines will intersect in front of the monitor, which is why the image appears to be floating in front of the monitor.  I’m still experiencing some issues with the red filter – the cyan linework appears as a very dark grey, but it is easily seen and a bit of a ghost image is seen when viewing the picture with both eyes.

Now, to get a rabbit in front of the screen over a white background, we want the Red linework to the left of the Cyan

That’s all well and good, but how about a filled in image against a black background

The White rabbit really pops out, but the old red filter is acting up again. The left side of the rabbit covered in cyan really should be blocked out, but instead it appears as if the rabbit has a bit of a red drop shadow. A smaller offset between the cyan and red images will make the shadow less apparent, but it will also reduce the depth of the image. I’m using depth here to both signify movement into the screen and out of the screen. Orthogonal displacement amplitude may be a better term, but that sounds kinda schmucky.

Blue/Red filled in rabbit

I noticed that I got significantly greater performance through the red filter by changing the cyan color to blue by simply removing the green component. On an RGB scale, Red is Red255,Green0,Blue0, which I’ll write in the form of [Red,Green,Blue], making this [255,0,0]. Cyan is an equal mix of the strongest amplitude of Green and Blue and has a value of [0,255,255]. Blue is just old blue and has a value of [0,0,255]. I think my red filter doesn’t have a very sharp wavelength cutoff point and seems to roll off a bit into the green (hence the color that contains green leaks a bit through the filter). Pure blue contains only light of much shorter wavelength and is far enough out of the range to be cut completely out of the red filter. So the blue/red combination is able to get the highest extinction, but it also appears a bit strange.

What we see in the overlapping region is magenta [255,0,255], a combination of highest blue and highest red. What’s interesting is that the red filter only sees red and the blue filter only sees blue. The mind puts this together as magenta, only it needs to get this color information from both eyes. One color is completely lacking in one eye and the other color is completely lacking in the other eye. This means that you still can see the resulting color, but it appears to almost be “flashing” because of how the brain draws the image in the virtual cortex. It seems to be more difficult to look at for extended periods of time but I believe the “flashing” can be a neat effect when used as a highlight in proper doses. Heck, Mario needs to get a star and start flashing away!

That’s all for tonight. I’m playing around with more color combinations and am also working on an animated Jefferson Airplane logo. Depending on how much free time I have, I hope to get a post up about one or both of these topics this weak.

g’night!

-Bob

The idea for this project came out of boring meetings where my mind would wander. I’ve always loved Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit song – it’s one of the trippiest thing out there. It wasn’t long before the idea of the best acid trip soundtrack merged with the idea of making a 3d (technically stereoscopic, but we’ll get there in due time) movie. The 3d method I’m employing here is the old school Red/Cyan glasses approach. The glasses work so that only Red color passes through the Red filter and Cyan light passes through the Cyan filter. By slightly offsetting the positions of each eye’s image, the seen image can be altered to appear at different depths.

Back on track… I had the perfect acid trip song… I had the perfect acid trip viewing method… I just needed the perfect acid trip visuals/storyline. Alice in Wonderland is obviously the primary influence of the song, but I’ve never been much of a fan of the material (what can I say, the movie scared me as a kid – I was a wimp!) and it’s been done a lot (there are many cool YouTube videos of various Alice imagery set to WR). Playing a video game one day, it hit me! Mario! Mushrooms make you bigger, mushrooms make you smaller. Fits the source. Plus, many have accused the game’s wacky setting and characters on a high high high Miyamoto. I also liked the idea of working with video game sprites. There are many great user groups out there who have done a lot of work with sprites, so I hope I can make this video within a couple of months.

That’s it for now. Yup, I’ll probably be using this rambling style for the whole of this blog so I apologize if you find it off putting. Hopefully I can put together a fun little video here and the coolest thing is if my efforts can inspire some people to say “I can do much better than that schmuck!” and back up their words with awesome videos.

Enjoy!

-Bobbo