A few years ago, I started working with a well established digital imaging company based in San Francisco, San Francisco Imaging, doing a series of 3D stereo images using Bryce, which are being printed on a brand new type of printer called the StereoJet. It's a brand new, cutting edge technology that's able to output a set of stereoscopic images in one print, which, when viewed with a set of Polarized glasses, allows the viewer to see depth in the image, as well as other areas of the image to "float' in front of the print. And it's not your usual red & blue grayscale anaglyph image, we're talking rich, beautiful color. It's printed onto a transparent media, which allows the print to be shown with an overhead projector onto a silver reflective screen, as well as a foil backing for regular viewing.  You can follow the link above  to the StereoJet area to learn more about it.

Since I can't see stereo myself due to a childhood accident which left me blind in one eye, this concept was totally foreign,  and it was strange, new territory for me. I was able to intellectually understand the concepts of this, it was difficult to grasp how it worked. At first, I came close to passing this project up, thinking that it would be impossible for me to be able to work on it due to the obvious problem with me literally not being able to see what I was doing. Talk about working blind! 

I was very fortunate enough to be able to work with Beth West, a very patient and talented graphic designer at SF Imaging.  A lot of time was spent on the phone, and we exchanged a lot of email the next few weeks,  going over what I was doing wrong,  and suggested changes that were needed to get this to work properly. Long distance collaborations can get pretty intense, but she was able to communicate things in a way that made sense. 

She supplied me with some left and right stereo sample images which I studied for hours on end, trying to understand how much sideways movement of the virtual camera was needed in order for this to work.  In order to "see" the effect, I turned the supplied images into an animated GIF file, and studied  different objects in the image to get a feel for the camera movement needed. Below is a sample set of images I created, which I aligned in the way that is needed for this printing process. I turned in into an animation so you could "see the movement" that is generated. 

After a lot of trial and error, I was able to get the proper separation of the left and right images inside Bryce, and over the next few weeks, I generated many different images, trying to come up with a good balance of an image that looks cool on it's own, as well as being able to really showcase the potential of this new 3D stereo printing process. It was the start of an exciting adventure in 3D scene building.

Since there are two sets of images generated for this to work, I had to think about the composition in a totally different way than my usual way of working.  I wasn't able to make use of my usual "cheats"- I couldn't just scale something larger or smaller instead of moving it closer or farther to the camera, since doing that would show up in the final stereo image. So placement of objects in the scene was vital to the success of the final images. Things needed to be properly placed front to back in order to get the proper feel for the 3D effect, and I also had to avoid allowing anything in the scene to be on any of the 
"edges" of the images, since that would cause problems. 

I did a series of test images which I turned into red blue anaglyphs, and sent them to Beth for feedback. After making some changes based on her suggestions, I sent another one to her and got an email back telling me that "I got it!".  I made a set of notes of what I had set the camera positions to, and geared up to start getting creative.

The staff at SF Imaging had surfed through my Bryce image galleries, and I was asked to create a stereo version of an image called "Infinity"  that I had done a while back, since it would lend itself nicely to this project. I changed a few things in the original scene, adding a cloud bank near the ground, rendered both eye views, anaglyphed them, and sent them for approval. It worked great,  and I rendered and sent them the two high resolution images that they needed to be printed.

A week later, a box arrived with a copy of the print for me to keep, and as soon as my wife Jill got home, I stuck a pair of Polarized glasses on her head and held up the print. I laughed watching her as she tried to touch something inside the print which was floating out in front! She was convinced that there was something literally sticking out from the print, floating "Right there". She put her finger on where this object was supposedly located, and her finger was a few inches in front of the print itself.  Wow- although this whole stereoscopic thing is totally lost on me, apparently it worked, and worked beautifully.

After a lot of experimentation, I was able to get a pretty good handle on how to create the proper camera movements in Bryce.  I set off to create art that would lend itself to the Stereo process.

Then something incredibly cool happened. I'm still unsure as to the sequence of events, or the details involved, but I was asked to create a piece of artwork which was going to be printed on this new printer and presented to Steve Jobs. 

After some very difficult and exhausting weeks, I finally had an image that was worthy. I invested well over 200 hours on this project, not including the render times. I burned 4 CD ROMs filled with scene files and artwork, and generated somewhere over 250 images while going through the creative process, looking for just the right combination of things to end up with "The image".

Here's what I had to do in order to get to the final image:

1) It had to stand alone as a cool image, regardless of the cool stereo effects of the printing process itself.

2) I had to make sure that nothing was touching the edges of the image, as it would cause optical confusion to the viewer if something was "cut off" in the right view, but visible in the left.

3) I had to come up with a way of working  the Apple Logo into the image, and make it look good. There had to be a reason for it to be there, not just stuck into a scene for no reason.

4) Someone told me that Steve Jobs likes the Tangerine I-Mac color the best. After all of this, I sure hope this is true! Haha!

With this background, I'm going to share some of the images I created as I went about creating this image. This is a cross section of the "steps" I took as I tried to find the perfect image. These images are all reduced to a small size in order to allow the visitor the ability to see as many as possible, without spending days going through them all. I compressed them greatly in order to make them load as quickly as possible- in other words, I've done everything possible to allow you to see these samples, but be prepared to spend some time going through them all. It's not a usual gallery, but I thought that others would enjoy this, and appreciate seeing what goes on in the creative process. It took a lot longer than I ever would have imagined, it was horribly frustrating, but it was a rewarding experience to go through.

Some of these scenes literally took days to render a 640 by 480 image. At times my machine would "blue screen" on me. These were rendered on the only machine I have, a  Pentium 166 with 96 megs of memory. The final scene took over a half hour just to load, and it bogged this box down so bad that it would blue screen on me if I added even one more light to the final scene as you see it. I was literally on the edge with this project.

I've gleaned a small representation of this project, and I now present you with 130 or so images. They're small, so they will load quickly.
Enjoy this experience!

Steve Lareau

-AN UPDATE-

Since this gallery was put online, things fell through. The printing company wasn't able to get any more of the special plastic film they were using to print on, which was the key to this whole process. The film was spotted, streaked, and blotchy,  and it was just unusable. The whole project with the StereoJet printer died. Steve Jobs never got the print of this image, and I didn't get the new G4 I was promised for all the effort I put into this project.  Argh....

If you know someone at Apple, pass the URL of this gallery to them and see if someone knows someone who could get this image into his hands. At least I'd have the satisfaction that all this work wasn't wasted and the guy it was made for finally saw it.. 

Begin the step by step tour

Jump to the Final Image

Sample anaglyphs to take a look at!

Anaglyph of the final image!