Popular Mechanics magazine published an article last Friday on the work done to convert the new movie “G-Force” into stereoscopic 3D. It goes on to talk about the techniques involved in taking a traditionally shot 2D movie and creating the left eye parallax digitally. By which I can’t say too much about, but just trust me…it was MUCH harder than this article makes it out to be.

There was a lot of time spent on this film’s 3D conversion. And because it was done so well, you’ll never know.

Read more below!

LINK: How Effects Wizards Transformed G-Force From 2D to 3D

First, artists scanned the 2D plate photography into the computer, then rotoscoped—or traced—all the elements of the scene. “We’re effectively defining the edges of all the objects that are in the photography,” Engle explains. Next comes match-moving, where artists create a virtual representation of the set during photography. “Imagine I’ve photographed a coffee mug on the table,” Engle says. “We’d put into the computer a digital coffee mug, a digital table, and a digital representation of where the camera is.” This allows animators to place the CG guinea pigs in the virtual scene and, once satisfied with the movement, place that element on top of the original plate. “Everything will feel like it’s been photographed at the same time,” Engle says.

Next, animators projected the plate, without CG characters, onto the match-move geometry. The original view represented the left eye, and filmmakers took a picture of the plate from the right-eye perspective to synthesize the second view. “Now, I have a picture that represents what we would have seen had there really been a [second] camera on-set in the right-eye position,” Engle says.

But because the left and right eyes are separated by about two and a half inches, they each see a slightly different view, creating something called object occlusion. “The left-eye photograph doesn’t have all the information we need to see from the right eye,” Engle explains. “We’re missing information that was never in the left-eye photograph. So we have to fill in that hole, and there are a series of techniques including optical tracking and painting we use to fill in the holes.” The final step to create the 3D shot is to integrate the CG guinea pigs (which have been rendered in 3D) into the synthesized 3D plate.