OTOY Forums

I just lost a few hours of my life trying to get floating point depth buffer info from Octane 3ds max into After Effects.

I tried exr/rpf/rla file output for a frame but it seems you can only get 0-255 greyscale depth out of Octane as a 'colour buffer' plus you can't dump those channels whilst you are rendering the scene in one go? If this is the case for normals to it would be nice to get higher precision float normals out too.

And aftereffects '3d stuff' seems like it only wants to work with depth and colour bundled in the same RPF file? Also the depth seems inverted but I guess that's to work with more hacky 0-255 blending rather than using 32bit float precision depth?

Somewhat related it would be nice to get in some simple exponential fog in the post processing to minimise the need to do such things as the very nice volumetric fog is somewhat intensive to be able to use all the time.

I dont have any problem about compositing or rendered passes from octane.
You must render each info channel one by one. For example save the zdepth pass as targa or exr. then load it into layer's alpha channel ( alpha by Luma)and it works.This is how i use it. Also if you use plugins or special effects like 3d fog or 3d lens effects from AfterEffects you can use the zdepth pass as seperated layer.

Alpha in a TGA mostly is 8bit isn't it from how most packages deal with the format? But 32bit float alpha might work I guess in an EXR.

Seems like I might need to fiddle some more and see if I can get that to work then thanks.