Maya Depth Shader emulated DOF?

[beaker]

I'm confused, first you say you want a z shader for emulating a true z,but then say you want settings for "Sharpness and falloff values for the rear and frontal DOF". Why do you need those? I would think the fake z files would be for doing the dof in post, not maya. Wouldnt all those settings be taken care of in the compositor?

[lowkey]

besides that, why 'fake' depth images at all?

maya's got an option for calculating depth and putting it out into greyscale images. anyway, i wonder if depth is directly integrated into the rendered images or put out into separate files?! :shrug:

never used this feature yet, though it might come in handy when creating DOF during post! any experience reports on this?

[Medicine Horse]

Actually that *could* be controlled in the compositer.

More specifically what I'm talking about is being able to define the range for the Black point and the white Point in Maya in regard to the distance. (DOF)

True I could throw a level on the on the Z depth render to control this. But it would save me a process step if I could do this in Maya.

I do most of my work in Cinema4D. In Cinema I can tightly control my Depth channel so I come up with a render that needs very little tweaking in post.

example.. Really tight DOF.

Does this make sense?

[Medicine Horse]

Maya does NOT render the depth with Antialiasing so it's pretty crappy.

Plus, from my experience with it. If you turn the post DOF off, you can no longer animate the depth.

[lowkey]

ahhh yeah, i read about those aliasing problems! =[

so when i render greyscale images, does the size of those influence the interpreted depth info? what i'm after:

is it possible to render very small resolutions for depth only and apply this info on high resolution renders? like it's possible to render very small images containig 'motion vectors' and applying motion blur from the command line afterwards?

this would be pretty cool! :thumbsup:

[Medicine Horse]

It probably wouldn't be the cleanest and/or the best looking thing to use low rez depth maps because they relate pixel by pixel to the image your working with. In my case I'd be using the luminence values to blur my main image. It doesn't help me any that the z-depth buffer from maya is only 16 bit, this would make for some chunky blurring in some areas.

For working with motion vectors low rez would work just fine.


-M

[beaker]

>>Maya does NOT render the depth with Antialiasing so it's pretty crappy.

None of the renderers out there antialias the z channel.

[Medicine Horse]

Cinema does.

[beaker]

>>It doesn't help me any that the z-depth buffer from maya is only 16 bit, this would make for some chunky blurring in some areas.

Z-depth in most packages are done in float, not 16(including maya).

[beaker]

>>Cinema does.

I doubt it. Z depth files can't be antialiased by the renderer(depth float data cannot be filtered like an rgb image). This is the same reason why you cannot have motion blurred depth matte shadows(deep shadows solve this problem though).

[Medicine Horse]

All I know is when I render out a Depth layer from Cinema4D, my image is crisp and clean. I'd like to get that same result from Maya. It seems a Shader is the best approach.

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