ZBrushCentral

Zdepth animation pass?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

With BPR not rendering colored lights, and not being able to export passes for timeline automatically my workflow has evolved to rendering passes manually for compositing. This has many advantages as I’m able to achieve effects that would be difficult in Zbrush.

The one pass, however, I cannot reproduce is the Zdepth pass. I would like to request a Zdepth material that will allow me to render Zdepth as a custom pass for compositing.

Also, when I set up a shadow pass on a white model with AA on using BPR, white artifacts appear around the edge which cause problems in composite. This has lead me to use the old AAhalf even while using BPR. The only advantage of this is I can generate passes using Best Render if needed since the canvas is already the correct size.

Thoughts? :wink:

#2

Just use Alpha>Grab Doc. This will capture a depth image for you, which can be exported from the Alpha palette.

#3

Well, wouldn’t that only do one frame at a time? If I am rendering a 30 second sequence at 30fps that would require me to do that 900 times, I suppose maybe I could use a macro to automate it or something… is there a command to go to the next frame (not next keyframe)?

#4

bump because I don’t think this was actually answered :frowning:

I could do it frame by frame if there was a way to record a macro that would advance to the next frame, grab alpha from doc, export alpha, and preferably change the filetype to tif. Even if I had to type the filename by hand, I could do it if all I had to do was hit 1 button for that macro to run. Ideally a script, where the above commands would run, but it would export using the current frame as the filename suffix. But I’m not a programmer and don’t really know where to start on something like this. :confused:

#5

bump, because I’d really like a Zdepth pass without manually changing to each frame, grabbing the alpha and exporting, that’s not very user friendly.

anyone have any thoughts? :slight_smile:

#6

I can’t let this die! lol

I really want Zdepth passes for an entire sequence, and don’t have the time to do it frame by frame…

:cry: