Stereoscopic Scripts

The title of this chapter is slightly misleading, as Nuke isn’t actually limited to stereoscopic views, but rather provides multi-view support for as many views as you need. The views do not have to be stereo pairs, but since that is the most obvious application, this chapter mainly deals with stereoscopic projects.

Quick Start

In many ways, Nuke lets you work on stereoscopic material just like you would on any other images. However, there are also a few stereo-specific settings and nodes that you need to be aware of when compositing stereoscopic material. The following teaches you how to set up your stereo project, read in and view your images, use the stereo nodes, and render the final output.

Here's a quick overview of the workflow:

The first step in working on stereo footage in Nuke is to set up views for them in your project settings (you can open up the project settings by pressing S over the Node Graph). Press Set up views for stereo on the Views tab to do this. For more information, see Setting Up Views for the Script.

You can then load your stereo footage into Nuke, either by entering a variable in the file name field or by using a JoinViews node. For more information, see Loading Multi-View Images.

In the Viewer, you can select which view to display with the views buttons. You can also display the views side by side or mix them together with the SideBySide and MixViews nodes. For more information, see Displaying Views in the Viewer.

Sometimes you need to make changes to one view, while the other one remains as it is. In these cases you need to either split off a view using the View menu or, in case of RotoPaint, use the right-click options in the stroke/shape list to split off views. For more information, see Selecting Which Views Display Changes.

If you need to perform totally different actions on the two views, you can separate one view for processing with the OneView node. See Performing Different Actions on Different Views.

If you have a disparity field available, you can also use the correlate options in the RotoPaint node and the View menu to have changes made to one view automatically reproduced in the other. For more information, see Reproducing Changes Made to One View.

With the ShuffleViews node you can rearrange your views, and with the Anaglyph node you can convert your footage into a red and cyan anaglyph footage. For more information, see Swapping Views and Converting Images into Anaglyph.

Sometimes you need to re-adjust the convergence, or the inward rotation of your left and right view cameras. This changes the point in the image that appears at screen depth when viewed with 3D glasses. For more information, see Changing Convergence.

Finally, you can preview a view of your stereo project by flipbooking it and rendering it out. For more information, see Previewing Stereoscopic Images.