I made a landscape in VUE and the result is a fairly decent pic which, oh surprise, also resulted in a Z-Depth grayscale map.
Now… due to the fact that Z-Depth sounds so familiar…
Is there a way that I can drop the color picture on the canvas and then load the Z-Depth map in some way that I can use it to composit other ZBrush objects into the picture?
Lemo
I loaded the image and crop&fill’d it onto the canvas. Then I loaded the ZDepth grayskale into the alpha channel. I created a stencil out of the alpha channel and applied it with the ‘actual’ setting. Then I created a new layer.
When I placed geometry onto this new layer and played with the depth of that object I got a big step closer to my goal. However, I could not overcome the effect, that the stencil somehow modified my object… grrrrrrrrr.
Any ideas how I can manage to get this effect without the stencil modifying the object on the second layer while masking it with the zdepth grayscale?!
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Cheers
LemonNado
PS:Except for the VUE5 treeline the render consists out of geometry. Yep, I performed the mad deed and generated an entire grass scape out of real geometry. Muhahahaha. No joke: 849Million, 143 Thousand and a few more Polygons (1.4 hours rendertime on a 1.9GHz P4 w. 2GB ram…). I thought my PC explodes… There were already Poly’s coming out of the power supplies fan! The power of 2.5D…
PPS:I applied fog and funny as it is… fag was only rendered in the objects I placed… If I should have made this… I would have had no idea how hahaha. Rogue experimentation is always the best :D
OK, thanks to all your replies I found the solution!
I just can’t think straight today. It’s so easy…
I load the colormap as texture. The I crop&fill it into the correctly sized canvas. After that I import the ZDepth map as ALPHA. Dohhhh what else is an Alpha… grrrrr. I switch of the ‘clear color’ option, set the MAX option, and adjust the Alpha depth slider to 2048 as the minimum is to flat to allow insertion of other elements. A setting of 4096 distorted the picture to much. Then I crop&fill the alpha.
After that I can simply place all sorts of objects and the depth is maintained…
Even shadows are cast correctly. And fog works also…
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LemonNado
gotta love a dude who keeps pluggin away to find the answer…even with all those massive replies to help!