Maybe this is a daft suggestion, but would it be possible for the vrayzdepth render element to have its ranges calculated from the vraycamera settings,
ie click on the ‘link to camera’ checkbox and:-
Focal point is set by camera target.
Zdepth max and minimum ranges are defined by the focal length specified in the camera.
This would mean that the dof calculated in post could be accuratey related to the physical cam… and it would mean you dont need to animated your dof in post. (although in some cases animating the dof in post is the preferred method).
I think so.
It means the workflow for dealing with dof in post can be largely done within max using the camera parameters and target point… rather than animating the focal point using a post dof effect.
I’m not sure if there’s much of a demand for this suggestion to be honest!
Is it just me? I’m interested to hear if others would have an interest in this?
You can do almost this by rendering your Z in hdr, (I think clamp Z should be off by default, but this is another thing…), and rendering a “camera target pass”, by this I mean a pass where everything is hidden, and your target is represented by a small cam facing plane, or anything, you can extract Z information from, (this pass should be quite fast to render out)
By normalizing your “target Z pass” you can extract the needed distance value, from that channel by sampling the pixels in the middle of your image (cam target is always at the middle… ) and with that value, I’m sure you can control your post DOF effect, even if it can’t accept direct numeric input, you can normalize your original Z with it (I’m sure a levels, or curves function accepts numeric input for black, white, and midpoints) so that it will look like what you’re wishing for here, and feed that to your post DOF function.
) and with that value, I’m sure you can control your post DOF effect, even if it can’t accept direct numeric input, you can normalize your original Z with it (I’m sure a levels, or curves function accepts numeric input for black, white, and midpoints) so that it will look like what you’re wishing for here, and feed that to your post DOF function.