Stereoscopic Viewing on Consumer Level Graphics cards?

[RAGEdemon]

Firstly, thank you for taking a look into Stereoscopic 3D.

Unfortunately, the current implementation seems to be only via the OpenGL Quad Buffer, which is only available on the expensive high-end professional Quadro and FireGL graphics cards and workstations.

The vast majority of Keyshot buyers do not have access to such high level hardware.

Are there any plans to allow Stereoscopic 3D on standard consumer level graphics cards?

I realise that Quadbuffered Stereoscopic 3D is the easiest implementation, but it is also restricted to the high end elite.

There are other methods that are also supportable:

nVidia already provide the consumer variant 3D vision driver, which although DirectX only, does allow for Stereoscopic display in the likes of Google Earth, as well as the majority of all games to an extent.

ATi/AMD have their HD3D solution.

Interestingly, John Carmack of id software confirmed that they somehow got Quadbuffered Stereoscopic 3D to work on consumer level graphics cards in their latest Doom BFG edition release, which is OpenGL. 

There are also independent projects which have managed to emulate quad buffered Stereoscopic 3D, albeit in Linux:

https://github.com/magestik/glQuadBufferEmu

I realise that a lot of work has gone into making Stereoscopic 3D available for keyshot. I feel that it is a great shame that only a very few wealthy and lucky individuals are able to use it. With a little more work, I hope that it can be a feature that is available to all users of even consumer level hardware, which accounts for the vast majority of the Keyshot userbase.

On a side note, "Render in Stereoscopic 3D" checkbox is grayed out unless "View in stereoscopic 3D" checkbox is enabled. Why does one need to have "View in Stereoscopic 3D" mode enabled to be able to render a Stereoscopic image? Again, this seems to be arbitrarily restrictive. Surely it is possible to render an image from 2 perspectives without needing to view preview image in Stereoscopic 3D as well.

On a final note: It would be nice to have the Stereoscopic 3D option available in the demo. There is virtually no documentation on this feature, or even the minimum requirements - I had to find out the hard way that stereoscopic 3D is only available through Quadbuffered OpenGL, and not consumer level 3D vision, or Emulated Quadbuffered S3D as I had excitedly hoped. I was disappointed to say the least.

Sincere Regards.

[KeyShot]

Most mac laptops support opengl quad buffer stereo without any restrictions. We have shown stereo with the relatively inexpensive quadro 600 card (USD 143 on Amazon). The reason why we use opengl quadbuffer is that it is a standard that works (when it is supported by the card) and it is necessary for the graphics card to synchronize with the monitor (which is difficult with some of the solutions that try to work around restrictions in the graphics driver).

[zsolt67]

Is there any plan for a simple side by side? works on all 3d monitor and tv

[tomasloun]

We have the same question: Will it be possible to render the stereoscopic images as side by side without special graphics card?

To compute side by side image simply needs to calculate the scene twice with camera shift only. The output picture can be processed or displayed by any external software then.

[DMerz III]

I think I saw something in the Keyshot 7 sneak peak which will include this feature. Looks like they're working on it!