z-depth

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# 1 05-12-2007 , 02:53 PM

Registered User
Join Date: Nov 2007

Posts: 75

I'm trying to render a scene in several passes, but After effects doesn't display a z channel. I've tried rendering as softimage, but no joy. (I didn't forget to tick the depth channel box) usually I just delete all geometry except for anything that passes in front of the object I'm trying to isolate. Then apply a black surface shader, and remove all light links, but this leaves a lot of geometry in a scene that I don't need. I don't know how badly this effects render time, but surely, if the z channel was working I could just render the isolated object. Is there something I'm doing wrong in Maya, or Aftereffects?

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# 2 06-12-2007 , 11:13 AM

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Join Date: Jan 2005

Location: vienna

Posts: 1,095

never been able to bring maya to render zdepth in a batchrender. neither with version 6.0 nor with 8.5 nor with any version in between. hope anyone can help you and me.

usually you check Depth Channel in the renderGlobals and select your renderCam. I think the clipping planes in the renderCam should define the b/w contrast similar to 3dsmax (I started to render zDepth with 3ds)

the odd thing with maya is the manual gives this 2line explanation, that´s all

"Depth Channel (Z Depth)

Controls whether rendered images contain a depth channel. The default setting is off."

user added image

well well

maya allways did create images for me (tga, png whatever) but they are all white in viewers and Photoshop tells -> cannot interpret file format...

never ever got it working. by now I am sure maya´s render zDepth checkbox was allways ment to be a joke with no internal connections to make users ... :headbang:

hope anyone has a solution and sorry for spamming your thread

everything starts and ends in the right place at the right time.

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