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ANY maya user with ANY luck extracting z info to AE PLEEEEEZE respond
I’ve searched high and low, but I can’t seem to find any posts that suggest any Maya users have successfully extracted the z depth info from their maya render for use by AE’s 3D tools, like Depth Matte.
If you have, please let me know what file format you exported from Maya to get this data.
(As a last ditch effort, I’d be happy with instructions on how to get maya to render out my z info as a greyscale image, and how to get AE to read that.)
Thanks,
GregAntifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezemotiongraphics.com -
5 Replies
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Hmmm. So far it looks like the RLA file is the only one that AE will even recognize, but it has some nasty aliasing on it, as if the z channel didn’t support any anti-aliasing. (2-bit color?)
If anyone from Adobe would like to comment, we’d really appreciate being pointed to a list of currently supported formats/applications to be used with the 3D tools.
Thanks,
Gregp.s. I’m using 6.0. Let me know if this was fixed in 6.5
Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezemotiongraphics.com -
I’m not a Maya user (C4D), but I know that AE will import both RLA and RPF files. I have used z depth information in RPF a lot in AE. If you export your files with an alpha channel, AE does not always reconize the alpha channel and everything looks bad on the aliasing. If you did export your files with a alpha channel, go into the clip properties and make sure that the alpha channel is not set to none. Also, with z depth information, sometimes it helps to export your files at twice the resolution then scale it down to 50% in AE. It helps to clean up the aliasing a bit.
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Kevin’s got a great Tip on exporting a higher RES RLA.
It makes sense that Z-depth can not be antialiased, because any 1 pixel sampled, can only have 1 depth.
Off-course, if you don’t use fancy stuff like displacement mapping, you can render out your anim once in normal res,
then disable all textures, lights, shadows, etc. and render that out again to a higher res with Z-depth: that could mean a significant boost in render-time, since you don’t need the textures and advanced shading anyway. -
Thanks, guys.
I’m trying to just get some objects that move away from the camera to fade out, but quickly learned that if I use fog to do it, I kill my ability to use an alpha channel for compositing because fog is, well, opaque!Related to that, what is the z depth a calculation of? Is it the physical z position of the object in maya? Or is it the distance of the object from the camera lens? I’m moving my camera around in maya, and thinking that this will probably make my z values change. Is that correct?
Thanks,
GregAntifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezemotiongraphics.com -
yes, it’s the position from the camera.
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