Making render passes in Maya isn't super difficult. I found that the help doc was all I needed to get me up to speed. Render Passes Help Page
For your specific needs, I'd just use the 'Camera Depth' pass for depth, and use 'Material Normal (World Space)' for your world space normal map. (You'll find those passes in the Create Render Passes window).
I would also make sure you render out Floating point images so your passes are as accurate as can be. You can find this in the Render settings window, in the Quality tab, under the Framebuffer section (at the bottom). Select 'RGBA (Float) 4x32 Bit' for your Data Type.
If you have any other questions about this let me know, I'd be happy to help.
Making render passes in Maya isn't super difficult. I found that the help doc was all I needed to get me up to speed. Render Passes Help Page
For your specific needs, I'd just use the 'Camera Depth' pass for depth, and use 'Material Normal (World Space)' for your world space normal map. (You'll find those passes in the Create Render Passes window).
I would also make sure you render out Floating point images so your passes are as accurate as can be. You can find this in the Render settings window, in the Quality tab, under the Framebuffer section (at the bottom). Select 'RGBA (Float) 4x32 Bit' for your Data Type.
If you have any other questions about this let me know, I'd be happy to help.
This is an excellent answer. Covers everything. Just so you know also, when you render out your depth map, you will get 2 pieces for every frame: one that will be the actual frame render and a _depth one that you won't be able to view, but as long as you keep in the same folder it will contain all of your info for that frame when you bring it into Nuke or Shake or whatever you are using in comp.
Generally each pass will render as a seperate texture.
also keep in mind that in addition to passes you have the render layer system.
If you create a new render layer and assign new materials within it those changes are specific to the layer. so you cans setup many specific shader setups and batch render them all at once. if Render passes arent doing what you want this is a great option.
Render layers let you override pretty much any attribute of an object in a per layer basis. generally you right click the attribute and you can create an override.
If you want to get all fancy dancy, you could use openEXR as your image format. That will render everything into one file. OpenEXR is real nice if you are composting your renders in nuke or something like that because you just need to import the one file sequence and you'll have access to all your passes. However in my experience, I find that rendering each pass out as separate TIFFs is the best way to go.
For some reason, my depth map does not have anything in it--it is pure transparent. My scene is simple: a sphere with the default lambert material and the default persp camera. There must be something I missed somewhere?
Thanks again for all these quick replies.
I've experienced similar problems with maya's camera depth pass. I wasn't ever able to get it working. I had to use the checkbox in the common settings to get a z-depth pass.
When maya renders a depth pass, it does so as a one channel image. Apparently TIFFs don't like that. You'll need to use an image format like IFF or OpenEXR to get a depth pass (Note that you'll need a plugin to open IFFs in Photoshop, and you'll have to use a compositing program like After Effects to access the depth channel in OpenEXR). An alternative is to render your depth pass as a separate render layer and assign a material override to the layer that maps z-depth to the material's color value.
I hope that makes sense, if not let me know and I'll whip up an example file for you to take a look at.
Replies
Making render passes in Maya isn't super difficult. I found that the help doc was all I needed to get me up to speed. Render Passes Help Page
For your specific needs, I'd just use the 'Camera Depth' pass for depth, and use 'Material Normal (World Space)' for your world space normal map. (You'll find those passes in the Create Render Passes window).
I would also make sure you render out Floating point images so your passes are as accurate as can be. You can find this in the Render settings window, in the Quality tab, under the Framebuffer section (at the bottom). Select 'RGBA (Float) 4x32 Bit' for your Data Type.
If you have any other questions about this let me know, I'd be happy to help.
This is an excellent answer. Covers everything. Just so you know also, when you render out your depth map, you will get 2 pieces for every frame: one that will be the actual frame render and a _depth one that you won't be able to view, but as long as you keep in the same folder it will contain all of your info for that frame when you bring it into Nuke or Shake or whatever you are using in comp.
also keep in mind that in addition to passes you have the render layer system.
If you create a new render layer and assign new materials within it those changes are specific to the layer. so you cans setup many specific shader setups and batch render them all at once. if Render passes arent doing what you want this is a great option.
Render layers let you override pretty much any attribute of an object in a per layer basis. generally you right click the attribute and you can create an override.
I've experienced similar problems with maya's camera depth pass. I wasn't ever able to get it working. I had to use the checkbox in the common settings to get a z-depth pass.
I hope that makes sense, if not let me know and I'll whip up an example file for you to take a look at.