Ha! That was me a couple days ago with the SAME problem, and I refused to give up and then I solved it. Thanks for sharing, because this is probably going to be an issue for someone else.Originally posted by farbtopf
hello, I just spent hours figuring out how to render out a proper zPass from maya -and I nearly went insane!!! ...
to be clear, do you mean like a 3d projection map of a white to black ramp with the projection node parented to the camera? I might have to try that.Originally posted by hammer.horror
Perhaps you could project a ramp from the camera and use that as a zdepth, this is the way I do my zdepth as it gives you more control over everything.
Originally posted by farbtopf
hello, I just spent hours figuring out how to render out a proper zPass from maya -and I nearly went insane!!! Using the Depth channel button in render globals seems to have no effect when running on a mac, on a pc I had some luck sometimes...
HERE'S AN INSTRUCTION ON HOW TO RENDER A zPASS FROM MAYA
Create a render layer, right click on it go presets>luminance depth and that's it you can even preview it in your render window before batching, don't know if that's the "prefessional" way to do it but it's easy and it works.
Maya creates a surface shader and ataches it to all objects on your layer, it doesn't seem to do that for particles though, you'll have to do that manually.
maybe this was already a well known fact, I thought I'd share it anyway
cheers
z depth with globals is ickly. Mayas zdepth will render out to iff if you dont have a 32 bit format chosen.
Main issues are that mayas z depth doesnt render out to a visible range so you have to multiply it into the visible range somtimes.
Also its not anti=aliased, when maya renders z depth it just finds distance as an absolute. So to get around that you have to render z depth at double res and than scale it down with a filter, which is really not fun. Shader ftw.
z depth with globals is ickly. Mayas zdepth will render out to iff if you dont have a 32 bit format chosen.
Main issues are that mayas z depth doesnt render out to a visible range so you have to multiply it into the visible range somtimes.
Also its not anti=aliased, when maya renders z depth it just finds distance as an absolute. So to get around that you have to render z depth at double res and than scale it down with a filter, which is really not fun. Shader ftw.