Z depth in Shake - how?

#1

Forgive me, I am total newbee when it comes to shake.

And today I have came uppon a problem - Maya Zdepth in Shake 2.5. I am sure it should and could be done, but so far, I have failed miserably.

There are two nodes for Z depth in shake. Which one should I choose? I tried both, but no sucess. There is 100 % a Z depth information in the file, I can check it both in Shake and Fcheck. Iff file. Maya render.

I have read many posts about this particular subject, but noone suggest plain and simple solution. I remember solving this problem half a year ago with a special plugin node for Shake, which was given to me by my tutor. It worked simple as! But it seems I cant find that beefed up node and I can figure out the solution.

Can anyone suggest straight forward solution for this problem? Please.

#2

Theres a simple tutorial in the docs covering that, walk through them and see if you can apply the same thing to your images

#3

there is a small macro on highend3d called “viewMayaZ”, which i personally use a lot…
it helps you bring your z-image to a visible range.

i use that one then to use reglar operations, that are not based on Z info anymore but on rgb values, which makes the handling a lot easier…
but be wrned that like that you lose some of the precission of the channel, but i never encountered visible artifacts.

cheers

alexx

#4

Alex, will try that… thanks a lot.

opacity, same thanks…

#5

I recently wrote a quick tutorial on this. Check it out.

#6

Hi Fredrik , ur tutorial is really very informative. Thanks.
but one thing i noticed, if i am not wrong, Maya Z-map is not antialiased, how do u solve that problem?

#7

Actually, it shouldn’t be antialiased …but if you want it to be antialiased you can either render your images in x2 size and then resize it down … or download the zdepth shader off highend3d.com (just apply it as a shader on all objects in your scene and then render) …or you could go with a really great z-DOF shader from mental ray:
http://homepage.mac.com/bauer/portfolio_shaders/zDepthDOF/zDepthDOF.html

I get the best results with the z-DOF shader for mental ray. It won’t really output a Z depth …but rather a matte for defocus.

#8

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