[Caleb Eberhardt]

It doesn’t seem to change anything when I do that except for making my background extra blurry, but I think I know what is causing the problem now. Since my depth pass (which I think I am using as a luminance matte, its a separate render out of maya using the “luminance depth” preset and has no alpha channel itself) is my character (close bits light back bits dark) surrounded by a black background, when I want close bits blurry, the entirety of the black background is considered in focus, and thus the blurring of the other bits aren’t allowed to bleed into it. I just assumed it had something to do with my beauty pass’s alpha.

When I manually changed my background from black to white in photoshop it solved the issue, except for the nasty black edges left around my character in the depth map which made the blur look poor, but that’s a maya issue.

Sam, was that what you meant by “clip the white contrast” or is that something different?

Thanks guys.