The Foundry has announced a new set of plugins for Nuke 5, these tools are built to ease the pain of post-production on 3D stereo films. The Foundry R&D team says that Ocula plugins use new disparity-mapping algorithms to warp, stretch, and squeeze just those areas of an image that require tweaking for optimal stereo viewing. This is a much higher level of control than just warping or shifting an entire image plane on X, Y or Z.

Ocula plug-ins allow artists to apply a multitude of adjustments to stereo image pairs. All corrections can be made to the left and right eye channels either together or separately, and the results of these corrections ultimately help to minimise or eliminate discomfort from the 3D viewing experience.

Users can correct horizontal alignment issues with Ocula’s Interocular Distance Shifter. Using disparity map data, a new ‘virtual’ view is created between the original left and right eye positions, with the result being that objects of different fore, mid and background depths are resolved more accurately for the viewer. This is different to an X-axis shift where only the image plane is moved.

Ocula’s Vertical Aligner will automatically attempt to vertically align corresponding image features in each view, to minimize or eliminate the effect known as ‘key-stoning’. This is not a single Y-shift for the whole image – with disparity mapping the correction varies across the entire image.

Ocula plugins should be available for the Nuke version 5.1 release in June of this year. More info at www.thefoundry.co.uk