Is it possible to achieve realtime stereoscopic previews inside 3dsmax viewports with the 3dhippie_stereocam? That would be great, right? Well: it is! but only indirectly. You can’t have stereo viewports at the moment but there is a brilliant plugin by the russian company kostasoft called 3D Vision Viewer to do something very similar. If you have a secondary monitor the plugin will establish a connection to Nvidia 3d Vision. This means you can have optimized anaglyph, interlaced output or even quad-buffered opengl. Fullscreen and for FREE!

Getting started:

You can get the plugin directly from kostasofts website or you can visit maxunderground if your russian isn’t fluent :-D. There are different versions for each 3dsmax version 32bit and 64 bit:

Download Kostasoft 3D Viewer_x32 for 3DS MAX 2010

Download Kostasoft 3D Viewer_x64 for 3DS MAX 2010

After installation of the plugin, you will find the 3D Vision Viewer at the utilities tab. The interface is very simple. Choose the correct cameras and start the preview. You might not be satisfied with the results: no 3D at all, strong color tints, something’s just wrong. There are good explanations and solutions to all of those problems:

1) It captures the viewports directly

This means, you have to have two viewports with a leftcamera and a rightcamera open. Expanding a single viewport will be destructive.

2) The viewports should be setup in a specific order

Viewport with index 1 should be left, and index 2 right. I would advise to also have a perpective viewport opened. The stereocam has a handy preset for this purpose: 2 cams + persp (bottom).

3) Both viewports need identical shading

Make sure that both viewport look the same. One viewport in wireframe and the other one smooth shaded will be unpleasant 3d. Also set the the transparancy to an equal setting (none, simple or best).

4) Get rid of unnecessary scene objects:

hide near plane, screen plane and far plane

hide the camera lookats

hide viewcube and steering wheel

With all these things in mind it is a fantastic experience to have realtime stereo inside 3dsmax. Have fun. Thank you kostasoft for making this plugin