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View Full Version : help- Need z-depth basics 101

Kinematics
03-18-2007, 08:51 AM
Hey guys, working on a project that requires camera depth of field i come from a maya background. how do u render a zdepth like in the maya way where i could adjust the greyscale values using the levels. so that i can animate the blur in after effects.

I have read around the forums but which blur do i use? i dont want the camera to do it and have to adjust the distance and all that cause theres alot of camera work. i would prefer to do this in post.

is this a post effect? how do i have this greyscale image from where the camera is?
and how do i apply it in after effects?
Per-Anders
03-18-2007, 04:37 PM
Currently all the depth of field options for C4D are post effects, you control the z-depth pass with the cameras depth settings, so you can either set it up there or animate it there as you wish, the inbuilt DOF allows you to map it's DOF based on gradients attached to this, however it sounds like you want to do the DOF in another application, e.g. AE or Shake in which case you may find the RLA/RPF formats useful by their nature of storing as much scene information as possible in a bitmap including the depth that you can depending on your compositing app then remap accordingly, I would give them a test to see what will work for you.
Kinematics
03-18-2007, 05:37 PM
Yes i did check on the RLA format per-anders :) It seems like it would work but im rendering everything else as .iff because i trust that format. given the deadline and all that...im afraid to render everything in RLA...but isit it possible in cinema 4d to just render that single pass without doing the standard pass.

What i mean is...in maya...if i wanted ambient occlusion i could just render that straight out. cinema4d seems to always include the complete version. also if i wanted ambient occlusion and only ambient occlusion without using the shader method... I cant. isit me? :D thanks again guys. as always.
Per-Anders
03-18-2007, 05:59 PM
Well you can set up the scene however you want, but that does involve making the changes to the scene itself, for instance you can simply attach a gradient to the camera or use black fog and a white material on everything (and env object may allow you to do that) to create a fast z-depth only. Apart from that currently no you can't render out just a single pass without the main RGB composite in C4D.
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03-18-2007, 05:59 PM
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