Animation Practice: Z-Depth

Animation Practice: Z-Depth

Rendering Z-Depth for still renders and animations is a very useful technique. It allows you to save the depth of field data from a camera used in a scene and use it for VFX work in other programs such as Nuke and Adobe After Effects. There are multiple ways of doing it but as I'm exporting my frames as .exr, I can make use of the format's ability to store Z-Depth information.

Rendering Z-Depth is done by turning on depth of field for your render camera and activating the Z-Depth AOV

The main appeal of rendering Z-Depth for use in software other than the 3D package you're using is that you can control depth of field on the fly and animate it easily in a program like After Effects without having to re-render a frame with each change. While 3DS Max or Maya will have to re-render everything just for you to see how different depth of field settings look, the process is simplified and much faster when depth of field is applied to the rendered frames in After Effects or Nuke as it is, put simply, a mask for the blur.

Lower focus distance

Higher focus distance

Just adjusting the focus distance was immensely faster than doing it in Maya.
You can even change options like where the camera is focused to achieve great looking focus movement and blurring. The blur options are very simple yet powerful, and can really improve the workflow of any animation's post-production.