Note: this is a little outdated. I have gotten this to work with newer versions of Blender so I will try to update this page soon.

About

This is a patch for Blender which allows a stereo setup for side-by-side viewing. For a nice intro to the cross-eye stereo method, go here. As of now, everything about the view3d's work except camera mode. You can "align camera to view" but you can't view from the camera.

I implemented this feature in a somewhat kludgy way -- it involves additional objects in the global structure and several test cases strewn about the rest of the code. If I find time, I may try to set this up as its own window type. This will probably be a more elegant way of achieving this sort of functionality and may even be acceptable for inclusion in bf-blender or tohopuu -- depending on how useful it is...

Download

The Linux binary may not run on all systems. They were compiled on glibc 2.5, so those who can't run it and/or have older versions of glibc will need to patch and compile Blender from source. Up to date systems should be fine (I've tested on Fedora 6+, Ubuntu 7.04+, Archlinux).

Windows and OSX users will also need to patch and compile from source. If someone can provide binaries for these platforms, let me know (contact info at bottom) and I can post a link.

To compile from source:

1. Download and extract blender-2.44 source code from here (or use svn).
2. Download the patch file (above).
3. Go into the root blender directory (blender-2.44 if using stable tarball, just blender if using svn)
4. patch the source stripping 1 level of directory heirarchy (in linux: patch -p1 < location-of-stereopatch)
5. Make sure you have all the dependencies, modify config/<your platform>-config.py to your liking and run scons.

Mini Tutorial

Using Stereo Blender is actually relatively simple. The first step is to create two viewports side-by-side.
Next, choose which views corresponds to what the left and right eyes see in the "View" menu.
For cross-eyed viewing, The viewport on the right should be set to left eye and the viewport on the left should be set to right eye.
Now, just treat the viewports as normal views. You can adjust the distance between the 'virtual' eyes using the "Eyes" slider.
Camera view does NOT work in the stereo viewports. If you want to use camera view, you can switch one of the viewports to "Standard 3D View" (see earlier screenshot). If you want to set up stereo cameras, find an angle you like, unset the "Lock layers and camera to scene" button (the little lock icon in the header next to the layers) for both viewports. For each viewport, choose a camera and hit ctrl+shift+numpad0. This WILL align the camera to the view, but because the stereo views don't support cameras, you won't see through the camera.