3D ORBITER Pic Discussion (Old 3D Pic Store)

[nasakid]

image shack is still not working

 

[Messierhunter]

So, if you want to see actual 3d images while you play in orbiter, in realtime, or whatever other game, exactly what do you need?

1) An nVidia card
2) nVidia stereo drivers listed above
3) 3d glasses of some kind, either anaglyph or some of these bad boys:
http://edimensional.com/product_info.php?cPath=21&products_id=29
(there's also a wireless version available for 30 bucks more)

If you go with edimensional glasses you can apparently use some of the ati radeon cards, but you have to use a "universal driver" so I would expect support to be spotty at best:
http://edimensional.com/support_updates.php

I'll post some examples taken with the nvidia drivers later tonight if I get the time. It might be fun to have a dedicated 3D screenshot thread at some point if enough users get into it. For those who don't have anaglyph glasses you can also present the images side by side with the left eye image on the right side and vice versa. The result is a "cross-eye" stereo image that can be viewed in 3d by crossing your eyes until the images overlap.

 

[Coolhand]

I always use Nvidea cards as they're better for 3d graphics work. I didn't realise that the stereo drivers would work with the crappy glasses though, i thought you needed those edimension ones. Thats very interesting i may have to try that, in combination with my homemade track IR that i still haven't made.

Is there much of a performance difference with the stereo drivers? does the card have to do substantially more operations per frame to render the 3d effect?

 

[Messierhunter]

I always use Nvidea cards as they're better for 3d graphics work. I didn't realise that the stereo drivers would work with the crappy glasses though, i thought you needed those edimension ones. Thats very interesting i may have to try that, in combination with my homemade track IR that i still haven't made.

Is there much of a performance difference with the stereo drivers? does the card have to do substantially more operations per frame to render the 3d effect?

It's one of nvidia's best kept secrets that you can use their stereo drivers for good ol' red/blue 3d. If I had known that before I bought my edimensionals I would have tested the drivers on my games first. As for performance difference, yes you do take a serious hit. In general, expect to get no more than half your previous framerate because every frame has to be rendered twice, once for each eye. I still find that the 3D effect compensates for the amount of the immersion in most cases. Some very high end games (like crysis) are simply out of the question though. And last but not least, all "post effects" must be turned off for it to work. Things like motion blur and some HDR seem to erradicate the stereo information before it reaches the monitor - the result is a flat image. Luckily this is never a problem for orbiter.

 

[Coolhand]

yeah i had thought as much, since you'd need to render 2 images to get the depth effect per frame. I can see how motion blur would cripple it, but then motion blur in games isn't true motion blur anyway, its more of a trippy trailback effect... since you need to render frames in advance of where you are and combine those with frames behind and the current frame to have a proper effect, hard to do in games since there's no way of predicting what a player is going to do and rendering ahead like that.

Interesting that HDR screws it up, since thats just a lighting effect, shouldn't have thought that would affect it.

 

[Messierhunter]

Interesting that HDR screws it up, since thats just a lighting effect, shouldn't have thought that would affect it.

That's more of a case-by-case thing really. It depends on how the particular game engine handles HDR. For instance, you have to disable all lighting effects, including HDR, via the config file in Oblivion to get 3D working, but it doesn't seem to interfere with anything in the Half-Life 2 engine (though the developers more recently threw a monkey wrench in some of nvidia's stereo features as they deemed it a "cheat" in counterstrike).

 

[tblaxland]

It's one of nvidia's best kept secrets that you can use their stereo drivers for good ol' red/blue 3d.

I hadn't realised this either until reading this thread. Thankyou!

I think my poor old FX5200 would suffer too much for real time viewing but for the odd sceenie this would be easier than making an image up in GIMP. As far as I can tell from Nvidia's site, I'll have to roll back my drivers to 91.31 to get this working under XP.

My past experience with 3D images is that the stereo separation is unrealistically exaggerated, giving me headaches if I look at an image for too long. It will be interesting to see how the Nvidia driver stacks up in this regard.

Now, all I've got to do is convince my 3yo son to lend me his red/blue glasses...

 

[Messierhunter]

My past experience with 3D images is that the stereo separation is unrealistically exaggerated, giving me headaches if I look at an image for too long. It will be interesting to see how the Nvidia driver stacks up in this regard.

The beautiful thing about using nvidia's drivers is that you can tune the stereo separation however you want it to be in realtime. Cntrl f4/f3 increase or decrease the stereo separation respectively. You can also control how far in front of or behind the screen you want the closest object to appear with cntrl f5/f6. The settings are also program-specific and are saved by pressing cntrl f7. Here's a shot I took in orbiter using the drivers:

My printscreen isn't working quite right on this pc right now, so I had to kind of relayer the shot by taking screen captures of the red and blue images separately using the nvidia stereo image viewer. Let me know if I didn't do it right. I don't have anaglyph glasses to test it right now.

 

[tblaxland]

My printscreen isn't working quite right on this pc right now, so I had to kind of relayer the shot by taking screen captures of the red and blue images separately using the nvidia stereo image viewer. Let me know if I didn't do it right. I don't have anaglyph glasses to test it right now.

The amount of separation in that image seems to be huge. The effect did not really work for me because the red/blue wasn't filtered out properly by my red/blue glasses, ie, in my right eye (blue) I could see both images. Other images earlier in the thread worked OK so there must be some difference in the colours.

 

[Messierhunter]

My understanding is that there is some way to customize the colors displayed in anaglyph, but I haven't played with that feature much myself. Here's another attempt at a pic:

 

[tblaxland]

My understanding is that there is some way to customize the colors displayed in anaglyph, but I haven't played with that feature much myself. Here's another attempt at a pic:

Yeah, I did read somewhere that red/cyan gives better results than red/blue provided you have the right filters. BTW, if I defocus my eyes a little the halos get lost in the blur and the 3d effect becomes more prominent. It is a little uncomfortable for long term viewing though

 

[Messierhunter]

It's probably my fault because I had to "recreate" the anaglyph by hand. You may get better results when using the drivers properly, or it may be that I need to take the shots ingame while set to anaglyph mode rather than asking the still image stereoviewer to reconvert the format.

 

[nasakid]

Yeah, I did read somewhere that red/cyan gives better results than red/blue provided you have the right filters. BTW, if I defocus my eyes a little the halos get lost in the blur and the 3d effect becomes more prominent. It is a little uncomfortable for long term viewing though

On My 3d image maker they have a 3d LCD selection and i dont know what that means.

 

[tblaxland]

On My 3d image maker they have a 3d LCD selection and i dont know what that means.

My guess is something to do with LCD shutter glasses, but I can't help you any more than that.

I thought those of you following this thread might be interested in this APOD:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080810.html