3D Printing - Step One - The Printer

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3D Multiplicity

It seems I have taken a bit of a break from photography, but getting back into it now. This is from a shoot back last summer with the awesome @SammiJo86.

Multiplicity shots - been done, 3D - getting old... 3D multiplicity... now there is some work :)

Loads more work to do, and some stuff to turn it into a lenticular piece... see you next new year.

Too hot to photo today...

Instead I thought I'd put together a video of my 3D rig in action and some of the outputs. There is even an app that controls all the rig function but also calculates all of the 3D geometry for you as well, warning you to possible issues like motion blur and speed limits on the buggy.

Overall, I'm particularly proud of my contraption, now I just need a way to make some money from it, 3D family portrait anyone? :)

Anyhow, enough jibber jabber, here is the video. You will need red/blue 3d glasses to see the anaglyphs later in the video.

The Poor Man's Geotagger

When researching for a location shoot, I spend a lot of time on Google maps looking for places to park, or the easiest walk or even for somewhere to go shoot. Street View allows for a pretty good idea of a place before you get there (admittedly it doesn't help if you want to go be in the middle of a field, but I digress).

The problem I find then is managing the list of places I want to go and check out. Sure you can write them down on a bit of paper, but my hand writing is pants. You can print out your map but that's quite time consuming to get right... Then when you get to the locations, but move down the road a bit... so... I need something to manage a list of locations... with SatNav capability and sharing...

I've got an (android only) app for that.

Rig re-jig

So I've had a productive weekend fiddling with my 3D rig. A complete software re-write and it is geared up for 3D. The rotational control is now redundant so could remove that, but it works well for timelapse so the rig may keep it... Or I may build another one... Hmmm...

Warning, the images in this post will require those really cool red/blue cinema 3D glasses from the 60s. If you don't have any, you can tape a couple of quality street wrappers to your regular glasses :)

So the first edition configuration would move to the right place, stop, trigger the camera and flash for each shot. This meant it could only do about a shot every 2 seconds with a reasonable set of strobes. You could possibly push 1 shot per second, but you'd probably end up with a dead shot somewhere in the pack. Basically it would take about 50 seconds to do a complete run. Don't get me wrong it worked well, but with a human who has to be as still as possible, this was a bit of a nightmare. Here are a couple of shots I managed to get with it.

Glasses on :) Click for a bigger version.



So version 2 of the setup involves a whole load of differences, not just on the rig. Basically though, the rig moves continuously though the shots (so you need a high shutter speed to reduce blur), and uses continuous lighting (so no flash recycle). A whopping 2.5 KW of light in fact. That gave me f/8 at 1/500th, and a run time of 2.25 seconds. Almost anyone can sit still for that. More realistically I reckon I can probably get an artistic shot in 6 seconds.

Glasses on. Here is my test shot. Yep, it's messy, but it has real depth... take that as you will.

3D - cross eyed and dotty

I have been doing a fair bit of 3D photography at the moment, the kind that you don't need glasses to see either. This technology is not all that new, it was around when I was a kid and I had a ruler that when you moved it from side to side the image changed - it's basically the same thing as that.

3D rig - the final cut

Ok, so I have finished all of the tweaks to the buggy and about ready to combine all of the notes into a version 2. So how does version 1 compare up to my original list of requirements? Well, it does pretty well actually.

There is a capacity problem in that the rig won't carry my heaviest gear because of a severe centre of gravity issue. The tripod head also caused some issues because of the weight being higher up, but also because the adjustment bars interfered with the power switch.

If you watch the video below, you'll notice a fair bit of "jitter" as the camera pans, this seems to be because of 2 things:

Rig fixs

So I tweaked the rig a little... getting the hang of stripping it down and rebuilding it now :)

Bench testing went well, time to put it on the rails with the fully loaded camera. A long story short and it held together pretty well but I was a little scared about the wobbling that was still there. Basically physics was not playing nice and it seems I'm having centre of gravity issues. Well, not me specifically... you know...

So the shots from the run make a nice stop-frame animation and it doesn't look all that bad (the lighting is pretty balanced for a start), but it's still not good enough for my liking - overall it's still wonky between shots because of the wobble and there is still a sweeping motion of the subject that shouldn't be there.

3D D-brief

After finishing my rig at 7:30 on Friday night with limited testing it was packed up and shipped to be used in its first test run Saturday morning... All-in-all not a bad first go, I did manage to get a couple of passable 3D shots from it, but it needs some tweaks...

1. Rotation motor slips - turns out to be a loose bolt holding the spindle to the camera plate.
2. Camera plate wobbles - turns out a bit of paper will fix it, but redesigned the top panel to only use 3 bearings, there is a reason tripods only have 3 legs, and it's not because of the name.
3. Jerky movement - software fix required to accelerate and decelerate slower.

So, that's this weekend's mini-project, and then some still life examples. For example a redo of this one.