Z Depth Infinity Error HtoA

[Anonymous]

Hey guys,

I'm fairly new to Arnold coming from Mantra so please forgive me if its a silly question,

I've noticed that areas of my render with no geometry render with the Far Clipping plane value in the Z pass, is there anyway I can have this render as 0 instead? I understand this is not physically correct but at the moment I'm getting errors with DoF in Nuke as the edges of my FG objects go from Z values of 6 to 100000

Any help is appreciated!

Nathan

[Stephen.Blair]

No, you won't be able to change it to 0. You could normalize the depth value to the 0-1 range:

...the Depth channel will give you non-antialiased, non-normalized depth data in the alpha channel. Non-normalized means that the Z depth values are not between 0 and 1 (distance in front of the camera), so you must divide the Z values by the far clipping plane value to get 0..1 values. This remapping is only required when viewing the depth channel in the viewer. It is not needed to make the zdefocus node work.

[Anonymous]

Ah damn, do you happen to know of any hacky way to get a render pass that returns the distance from camera without including empty areas of the scene?

[Anonymous]

Answer:
In the end I decided it's easier to bite the bullet and go with a deep workflow for the shots I was trying to cheat

[cipy6L6MD]

Hey Nathan,

too late but you could always adjust the clipping plane in 3d and move it closer to your subjects or do the same thing in Nuke with your Depth Data. Just merge (min operation) your depth stream with a constant node and adjust the values of your constant to be just a tiny bit further away from the camera.
On the other hand a deep workflow still gives cleaner results.

Cheers, Martin

[Anonymous]

Ah great suggestion thanks! That would have fixed it 😄