Maya depth pass and alpha channels in texture?

malcolm

Okay so by default rendering a depth pass out of maya mental ray does not support alpha channels, like when you have a video game tree and just renders the depth as quads, kind of useless. Am I missing something here?

MoP

Yeah I've been having trouble with that too.

I ended up just making a new Render Layer for z-depth (using a shading override on the render layer) and rendering it out separately, it doesn't take very long per frame for the z-depth pass so it doesn't add too much time on.

Sorry if that's not an actual solution, but it works well enough for me.

malcolm

What shader are you using Mop? The preset one for depth doesn't seem to support alpha.

MoP

I'm just using the default preset for adjusted camera depth shading override, but like I said I'm rendering it out as a completely new set of images as RGB, not rendering it to the alpha channel at all.

malcolm

Ah I see you are using a render pass not a render layer. I'm still trying to figure the whole when to use a layer rather than a pass thing.