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View Full Version : Mental Ray w/ Depth of Field HELP!!

kiaran
08-13-2003, 03:39 AM
Here's the problem:

First off, whenever I use the Maya Software renderer and render out a .rla file with a z-depth channel I can manipulate a depth of field effect in After Effects very easily/quickly. Maya's DOF will NOT work for me because it's just too clumbsy and slow.

Now... when I go to use this same technique in Mental Ray, instead of imbedding the z channel into the .rla file, mental ray spits out a separate file with the suffix ...depth.iff

Any .rla's render with MR will not work in AE for DOF, the z-channel is simply non-existent. However, if you check in Fcheck the z channel is indeed included in the extra file that I mentioned earlier. Unfortunatly this is an .iff file and AE does not support .iff's.

Does this mean that I can't use DOF now when I'm rendering with mental ray???? What compositing apps even support .iff? Seems like a pretty useless propietary format to me.

Is there some way I can convert the .iff with the z-depth into something I can use in AE to achieve DOF?

Please help, this is really pissing me off.:annoyed:

Thanks in advance,
Kiaran
trthing
08-13-2003, 05:04 AM
Which version of AE are you using? IFFs load fine on 5.5 here.
Anyway, the workaround would be batch convert the IFF seq into another format (I guess the majority of the image editing software do that, like Photoshop)...

What is funny is that I have real hard times getting DOF to work in AE through RLA images. Could you give me some hints? You probably do that through compound blur, right?
DeathBrain
08-13-2003, 05:09 AM
Yeap...even AE 5.0 works fine with IFF :)
Btw kiaran, if you want to play with .rla files with z-channel thingy, then you should use combustion
kiaran
08-13-2003, 09:40 AM
trThing
: No, I don't use compound blur. I have the 'production bundle' that comes with the added 3d channel effects. There is an effect called 'Depth of Field' that works directly on the z-channel to blur based on focal length,bias etc... It can be a little tricky to set up but as long as you set up the far camera clipping planes in Maya to as low a values as possible (without cutting off anything), it works very well. Oh yeah, don't forget to turn the layer quality in AE to 'best' otherwise the DOF looks way too terrible to judge.

The problem I'm having is that mental ray exports the z-channel into a different file (.iff). I've tried batch converting the .iff's as regular .tif's but then I don't know how to apply the separate z-channel file to blur the color channel file (.rla). I only know how to use the 'Depth of Field' effect on an imbedded z-channel.

This must sound ridiculous. If anyone understands what I'm trying to say here PLEASE help.

DeathBrain: I'm not sure why .iff's won't work for me, but that's not the real issue because I can easily batch convert to any other format that does work. Combustion eh? I'll look into it but I'm sure that my current software must be able to do this.
(AE 5.5 pro)

Thanks a bunch for your help,
Kiaran
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