Tip: How to get more usable zdepth maps with phoenix or the volume grid

[joconnell]

One slight annoyance with the volume grid is that it doesn't give you any depth info without switching over to volumetric geometry mode, which can give your edges a different look from your beauty pass which makes it less usable. One trick I found recently is that we can use the fire channel set to texture and use a falloff map set to distance blend using a near and far range that suits your scene. It'll keep the same nice soft edges you have in your cloud beauty and give you a useable ramp for doing depth cc in post.

Standard volumetric render depth channel with broken cloud depth:


Volumetric geo depth with correct depth and bad alpha:

Faked depth channel:

Fake depth settings:

[joconnell]

P.s. rendered with a vray 5 nightly beta in case there's any issues in the build - you can see the volumetric geometry zdepth falling off properly though.

[JonasNöll]

Cool, thank you for sharing! For the goemetry you just instance the same distance falloff in a VrayLightMaterial I assume? This way you can render clouds and geometry together in one pass?

[joconnell]

Yep, that's what I was doing alright!