Is there, or will there be, or could there be, an option to model in quality 3D stereo mode? Honestly, the only solution that I have found anywhere is a $750 product from SpatialView for Cinema4D only. Then you have to buy the appliance to view the result. Their SVI products for others (3dsMax, Maya, LW) don’t let you mode/edit while seeing stereo. If you don’t know about this, do you know someone who may help?
Thanks.
Is there, or will there be, or could there be, an option to model in quality 3D stereo mode?
Of course there is. It’s called “sculpting.” Clay’s pretty cheap, though I’ve seen very good results in marble if you’ve got the chops. And as an added bonus, sculpting also supports multitouch haptic controllers, as well as 6DOF viewing.
Search for “LCD Shutter Glasses” – they’re very affordable, and nVidia distributes a driver to display any Direct3D source in stereo. I believe there are similar projects to support OpenGL, but can’t think of any off the top of my head.
This will, of course, not help you because such drivers generally require a full-screen mode to work, and CG creation apps typically have seperate panels of Direct3D or OpenGL for the individual viewports, and even in one-panel configurations use a mixed mode to display your menus.
This is probably why the SpatialView solution you just mentioned has those limits – I’m guessing they’ve written a plugin to feed your model into a full-screen app which isn’t tied down by menus and can support these drivers.
Purely guessing based on interface layout, I think Silo has the best chance of working with these technologies directly. But that it probably won’t work either. Blender’s another thought. Or working directly in Second Life.
Speaking specifically of ZBrush, because you asked in a forum called ZBrush Central…
ZBrush uses neither DirectX nor OpenGL, as those offer no accelleration for Pixologic’s proprietary techniques (and frankly, aren’t as fast anyway). This isn’t going to change anytime soon.
Which means, you won’t have 3rd party support for a stereoscopic ZBrush solution. That support would have to come from directly Pixologic. And it’d have to be a very high priority for Pixologic to even consider putting it ahead of all other development.
Meanwhile, the LCD shutter solution doesn’t work very well on LCD screens, and nobody buys CRT anymore if they can help it. There are other display options which piggyback onto the same drivers, but if users aren’t buying those, there’s still no incentive to support them.
I think when stereo displays become commonplace for PC gamers, you’ll start to see support leak out into the professional applications. But I’ve been watching this technology for 15+ years, and I just don’t see it happening.
This said, there are modeling demonstrations at Siggraph every year which you’ll need to investigate. No clue what software they’re using – it’s not any of the widely used commercial platforms, but they are indeed modeling in high quality 3D stereo mode.
Typically, these people are trying to sell you a haptic controller of some sort. so, the next stop on your search is probably SensAble.com…
Again, though, you’re going about it backwards. The workflow you’re after is clearly some variation of:
- traditional sculpting in clay
- high-res 3D digitizing of your sculpture
- derive an optimized new topology from that scan
- extract detail from the scan to the optimized mesh