Another Z-Depth inquiry

#1

So I’m doing post-DOF in After-Effects. I’m rendering a default Z-Depth pass out of maya.

The problem that I am facing is that neither After-Effects or Photoshop (both CS4) are recognizing the separate z depth files. However I can open them in f check. I’m using png as my file format but this problem also arose when testing with tifs

I did a test by opening the first frame’s z depth image in fcheck and doing a “save as”. I imported this into AE just fine and was able to get DOF going using the lens blur effect.

So my question is, has anyone had this problem? Is there a way to use the z-depth renders that I already have? Fcheck doesn’t do any sort of batch stuff and I’d rather not do a “save as” for every single frame of the animation.

I’m looking into some other ways to render out this pass, but I really had to post this. There has to be a way to make this work. I’ve found that lots of people are unhappy with maya’s zdepth feature but I refuse to believe that there is no way to use this stuff as is.

Anyone?

#2

In my Maya days it did “Save Animation”, which is all you need. Have they removed that functionality? Anyway, the problem exists as long as Maya - the values are not normalized (if you choose IFF, it even uses a special sub-format just for depth with a unique binary encoding), so no other program can use them correctly. Conversion or re-rendering is therefore unavoidable.

Mylenium

#3

Yes, you are right. I forgot about “save animation” and was missing the check box for (zbuffer) when trying to open as animation. So this seems to be working just fine. Just finished my batch resave and I’m opening AE now. Kinda weird that by this version of maya that they still have this issue.

Well, thank you very much Mylenium! You saved me hours of headache. I feel silly for missing this.

#4

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