Hi - can someone describe for me how to render a z-depth pass of krakatoa particles? ie., i have an empty scene and am rendering just some krakatoa particles, and want to render a depth pass for comping purposes. Hopefully, this can be rendered at the same time as the actual rendered image, just as a separate pass, but any way to do it will do for us.
Mark
In Krakatoa v1.5.x, you have to write a Global Channels Override to produce a Z-Depth pass, so it has to be rendered separately from the RGB. Obviously, it can only reflect the depth to the CLOSEST particle in a pixel, so you have to switch the Filter to Nearest and increase the Density to Exponent of 31 to have closer particles overwrite farther ones.
The workflow is outlined here: software.primefocusworld.com/sof … maflow.php
In the upcoming v1.6.0, custom Render Elements including Z-pass will be generated at the same time as the RGB pass, so the processing will be much faster (and adding the faster multi-threaded drawing it is a lot faster), but the method is otherwise the same. You can get a preview of these new features currently in Beta here: software.primefocusworld.com/sof … ements.php
In earlier versions of Krakatoa (1.1.x and before), there were two special shading modes for producing Z-depth passes, but these are now obsolete.
thanks Bobo that’s really helpful,
cheers,
Mark
hmmm. We’ve tried to get the zdepth pass to render following the tutorial, but can’t. We’ll move over to 1.6 beta i think tonite – is that feature working as render elements in the current build?
It should work as render element in the Beta.
What exactly did not work in the previous build?