CrystalMaker Help > Guide > Embellishments

Icon

Stereo Viewing

CrystalMaker provides two ways of obtaining 3D "stereo" views: using the Red/Blue stereo mode, with the supplied stereo glasses, or using the more conventional stereo-pair plot method. Either can give impressive results, although most users find red/blue stereo plots easier to use.

Red/Blue Stereo

Red/Blue Stereo superimposes two views of a model at an angular offset (as defined in the Stereo pane of the Rendering Options window). The two views are filtered so that one uses shades of red, and the other shades of cyan (a mixture of blue and green).

If you wear stereo spectacles (supplied with the full version of CrystalMaker), an impressive three-dimensional effect can be achieved - with the model appearing to emerge out of the screen towards you. When used with CrystalMaker, stereo spectacles should have:

Left eye: red filter | Right eye: cyan, blue or green filter

Colour Red/Blue Stereo

When CrystalMaker is operating in the Colour rendering mode, Red/Blue Stereo images use a range of colours, to help you distinguish different atoms, bonds and polyhedra. These colours are based on your existing colour settings, but filtered by the lenses in your stereo spectacles.

For best results, try to avoid using colour hues that will be blocked by one or other of the lenses. Specifically, you should avoid pure red and pure cyan; we suggest moving towards colours in range orange-green and blue-indigo.

(It may be helpful considering the classic "Colour Wheel", which shows a range of hues from pure red at 0° through yellow at 60°, green at 120°, cyan at 180°, blue at 240° and magenta at 300°. The safest colours to use - those that easiest to view with Red/Cyan spectacles - are those orthogonal to the red-cyan axis, i.e., greenish-yellow at 90° and indigo at 270°.).

Greyscale Red/Blue Stereo

The "classic" red/blue stereo imaging model uses shades of grey; these are then easily passed by both filters of your stereo spectacles. This is available when you switch to the Greyscale rendering mode with Red/Blue stereo active. You should find this provides a more relaxed viewing mode than Colour red/blue stereo - but of course colour hues are replaced by shades of grey.

Stereo Pair

Stereo Pair plots show two side-by-side images, representing left- and right-views of a model. The two views should have an angular offset between them (as for red/blue stereo plots), and the distance between the two images on the screen should not be too large (it should relate to the distance between your eyes: the inter-occular distance). You can adjust these values using the Stereo pane of the Rendering Options window (Rendering > Rendering Options).

"Geowall" Support

You can use CrystalMaker's Stereo Pair mode to provide full colour 3D viewing with some projection systems. These systems usually rely on a pair of projectors: one for the left image, and one for the right image. The light from each projector may be plane polarised, so that when the composite image is viewed using appropriate polarised glasses, each eye sees the appropriate image.

To use CrystalMaker with such a system, you need to ensure that the Graphics window is resized to span two virtual monitors: one for the left-hand image, and one for the right-hand image.