Implementation: 2 cameras are used instead of 1, slightly shifted to left and right. What they see is rendered to 2 textures which are then sent to a PB3D shader that does the color transformations in order to produce an anaglyph image. This image is then printed on a plane which always faces the camera, which is actually what you see.
It’s a bit slow, but I think it can be considered a good proof of concept. If this was implemented on a more advanced 3D engine, performance should be just fine.
Color transform shader based on this PB2D work by David Shelton.
[UPDATE] – These demos are not working at the moment. I apologize. There seems to be quite a few problems with PixelBender3D and the latest Flash Player 11 release. Since this is still in Beta, I suppose this kind of problems are expected. I am waiting for a new PB3D release and will update the source as soon as possible.
Make sure you view this with red-cyan 3D glasses. Built on Minimole, fp11 needed.
It’s awesome~
But performance issue still remained.
Yeah, I know. RTT is a bit slow in the the current Molehill drop. I’m sure there are alternatives: either faster RTT or avoiding it altogether. Besides that, Minimole is not intended to be optimized at all, just a place to experiment.
I don’t know if Molehill exposes it as I haven’t used it however GL provides a function glColorMask that lets you enable/disable any combination of the 3 color channels R/G/B when drawing. By rendering the left eye with R enabled and then the right eye with G/B enabled you get red/cyan anaglyph rendering without any kind of processing. You don’t even need to enable blending since glColorMask controls what channels are written to and thus there is no chance of overlap between the channels of the left eye and the channels of the right.
Hey kode80,
Yep, that’s a wonderful point you’re making. Thanks a lot. I’ve taken the question to the Molehill experts, so lets see what they say about this.
Cheers!