Custom 3D Animations: Models for Movies

The recent explosion in popularity of 3D movies and products has been staggering and slightly overwhelming. Adults and kids around the world are flocking to movie theaters to pay premium prices for goggles that will let them view the feature film with the added immersion of the 3-dimensional experience. This demand has generated buzz among movie production companies and animation studios that are interested in expanding their reach and increasing the popularity of their movie. In order to keep up with market interest, animation studios are working on improving existing technology and developing new tools and techniques to provide custom 3D movies for their fans. The 3-dimensional world of a feature film allows moviegoers to be fully enveloped in the story and provides movie makers with a unique platform in which to tell their tale.

Creating an animated movie is a lot of work and involves thousands of hours of drawing and modeling and designing. Instead of duplicating that work for the 3D screen, animation studios have developed custom 3D stereoscopic models that make the transition from 2D to 3D much simpler. Stereoscopic techniques take advantage of the way your eyes focus and converge on a visual object in order to make it look like the projected image on a screen has depth. This sort of technology makes the animated characters appear to jump off of the screen and into the theater seating area. The term "stereoscopic" refers to the technique of rendering two different viewpoints and projecting them on to the screen at the same time. As your eyes focus and converge, the movie appears to comes to life. 

As noted above, one of the hurdles of creating custom 3D animated movies is the burden of having to render every scene twice from two different viewpoints in order to get the desired stereoscopic effect. Instead of duplicating work, some animation companies have developed a way to create their animation models in a stereoscopic format. Following this, they just have to add the animation and background in order to complete the movie.

There are, however, drawbacks and challenges to using stereoscopic techniques to achieve depth and immersion. One of the filmmaker's most powerful tools used to direct your eye within a particular scene is depth of field. Directors and photographers will manipulate the length of a shot in order to makes some objects within a scene stand out more than others. This is obviously harder to do with a 3-dimensional scene and can create a confusing stereo image. Most scenes in an average animated movie are 3 seconds long, but custom 3D movies use shots as long as 7 seconds in order to let the viewers' eyes become accustomed to the scene and prevent them from becoming confused or seasick.

As the technology for custom 3D presentations advances, we are bound to see more applications and use of stereoscopic techniques in our every day lives.