The Making of the World's First 3D Unreal Tournament Movie

Odviously if you are reading this you are interested in making your own 3D UT2004 Movie. First off, there are a few items that you will need:

  • nVidia GeForce graphics card (mandatory)
  • nVidia Stereo 3D Drivers (can be downloaded free of charge from nVidia's website)
  • a computer running Windows XP
  • 1 VCR or a TV that has video out ports
  • 1 MiniDV camcorder or better (I used a Sony TRV-38)
  • enough Composite/S-Video cable from your computer to the VCR (including audio cable!)
  • Composite/S-Video cable from the VCR to your camcorder
  • 1 Firewire cable
  • and lastly, you are going to need a GOOD computer to get this to work flawlessly with a high frame rate

Setting up the stereo drivers:

Assuming that you have correctly installed your nVidia card and have no problems with the ForceWare drivers, proceed to install the Stereo 3D drivers. Once the drivers have been installed, right-click on your desktop and choose "Properties." Hit the "Settings" tab then hit the button that says "Advanced." From there, all you have to do is just locate the Stereo 3D drivers option under the graphics card tab.

If you followed all the directions correctly, then you should get a screen simiular to this:
Stereo 3D Control Panel

Moving on, follow these to enable and tweak your settings for the Stereo driver:
Tweak Options

Note: The "Stereo Type Setup" was updated with a drop down menu, but we will be only using Anaglyph.

One tab/option in the Stereo 3D drivers panel has hotkeys for in-game tweaking of the separation, gamma, and field-of-vision in realtime. Make sure that none of these keys conflicts with any open utilities/programs that may be currently running.

Once you have sufficiently played around with the settings, it is time to test out UT2004 with the Stereo 3D drivers. Brace yourself, it gets pretty intense! Tinker around with the hotkeys until you can get sufficient 3D without ghosting. Remember, the higher the field-of-vision, the more your eyes will hurt, but you will get a much better 3D picture!

 

Installing and setting up RypelCam:

Please visit www.rypelcam.net to download this free mod. There are setup instructions and tutorials for using this advanced tool on their site as well. Note: At the time of the release of this tutorial, RypelCam has been taken down because someone found out how to use it as a hack tool for online play. They will re-release it once the problem has been fixed.

 
Recording a server-side demo and capturing your footage:

Step 1: Host your own LAN server and enable some bots. If you live in a dorm or apartment building, it would be best not to "advertise" your server for other people to find.

Step 2: Once your game has loaded, hit the "~" key and type in "demorec" to record a server-side demo of all the action, not just your own point of view (first person). Play the map as many times as you want to get the desired outcome. To do this movie, it took approximately 20 runs through the level to get the best outcome I was looking for.

Step 3: "Clone" your computer to your VCR so that there is an exact image of your computer being displayed. To do this, use a length of Composite/S-Video cable to hook your graphics card to your VCR (see images below). Once your cables are connected, single-click the nVidia icon in your system tray and you should hear the Windows "bua-bump" sound effect and a new option in the menu will appear. Navagate to that menu option and "clone" your computer to your TV by setting your computer monitor as the first one and your TV/VCR as the second one (there are options for this in the slide-outs).

Be sure to set UT2004's resolution to be the same as what your VCR is running. For example, my VCR allows 1024x768 resolution and that is what UT2004 should be set as.

output from gpu
input to VCR

Step 4: Plug in your camcorder to the video/audio outputs from the VCR and set it up for TV capture.

Step 5: To view your recorded demo, go to the "Community" area in the UT2004 menu to bring up the "Demos" area. Load up your demo.

Step 6: Follow the usage directions for RypelCam on their website (http://rypelcam.net). Using the full potential of RypelCam can produce some cool movies!

Step 7: When you are ready to record some footage, just hit the "Record" button on your camcorder and you will be recording live footage from your computer to MiniDV tape. Once you have recorded all the footage you need for editing, it is time to Firewire it back into your computer.

Step 8: From here, just pop your footage into your favorite editing program and have fun showing off your uber cool movie!

 

Pros and Cons of this Method:

Pros:
  • Relatively easy to do provided you have the right equipment lying around.
  • Can't shoot page-flipping (shutter glasses) for use in polar viewing.
  • Instead of shooting each eye separately and then adjusting the separation between layers in Premiere or Final Cut, you can pre-ajust the separation in realtime in the game before you even start shooting the footage. I find this to be a nice feature instead of shooting everything and finding out that there is a problem with something in the editing process.
  • Computers are exact with stereo 3D. All images generated won't have problems with them unless you don't set your separation right.

Cons:

  • Somewhere along the way there was some major quality loss in the video from the transfer. I fixed this by using a Premiere plugin called "InstantHD" which can transpose standard DV footage to HD 1080i footage without loss. It can even sharpen up the quality of the footage too! Sadly, this process took approximately 7 hours to render for the 7.5 min movie, but the wait time was well worth it. I then took the 1080i footage and recompressed the resolution of it down to standard DV size and the picture was much sharper than it origionally was.
  • Can be time consuming to get the project from start to finish. Shooting, tweaking, editing, and rendering took me approximately 40 hours. I am not joking, this is a time consuming process to get from point A to point B.
  • Once you edit your capture your footage, you can't change the stereo separation again unless you re-shoot the shot again, which can be time consuming.

 

Conclusion:

This method and all the research and trial and error testing took about 70 hours of my time plus the shooting and editing and capturing as stated above. The result was well worth all the effort I put into this as I have now opened up the door for other video game film makers to dive into the world of stereoscopic video game movies. Possibly in the future, there may be a method for recording page-flipping, but TVs have to be running at a higher refreshing rate than they currently are.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this tutorial can help you in your stereoscopic movie making quest!

This page and its contents are copyrighted by Hans Baumgaertner.