Friday 8 February 2013

Experimenting with 2D to 3D conversion

As the title says, I'm doing more experiments with converting 2D to 3D - er why? I hear you ask - well it's truly simple - I'm in the process of collecting footage for a short film about Dartmoor - a wild and beautiful region in the south west of England.

This is intended as a 3D production, but I have a problem: for those serious close ups of plants, flowers and details like this:




.... I need a 3D rig, capable of shooting with a very narrow IO ( interocular - the distance between the cameras eyes )  As this production is self funded, I do not have the necessary  to splash out on a mirror rig and the all important preview hardware to make this possible, and, climbing rocks with complicated set-ups, requires an assistant - well, most these outings are in pouring rain, snow and fog - my only companion being "Molly" the yellow labrador.

So, I'm looking for a software solution that will allow me to track a 2D camera move of a macro shot taken with my EX1 or 5D and then solve the move in 3D space. This then enables a depth map to be generated which positions the contents of the shot in 3D space. I've used a few "cod" pieces of conversion software - results are appalling, I need something like Nukex or PFDepth to get serious Hollywood results. 

Here's my first rough test:

2D to 3D Test

and another one:

Garden Leaves

and here's the shot of the daisy after creating about twelve tracked depth maps, and setting relevant positions in Z-Space - movements are very subtle, as it was a quiet sunny day when I shot this..

The Daisy macro

Hazel Tree leaves from Sony EX1 - 2D to 3D

These results are a great improvement on the earlier test shown a few posts down

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