Re: [Openexr-devel] "standard" for storing a depth map?

[Christopher Horvath]

If the depths are floating point values, they can simply be in "real world" units, and do not need to be normalized.

However, 16-bit floats are not really sufficient for "real-world" depth data, with units in feet, meters, or centimeters. When used as an input to something like a depth-based fogging node in Nuke or Shake, you'll see noticeable banding for a scene of the scale of a building or larger.

If you can make it so that the 'z' plane is 32-bit float, with the rest being whatever precision you need for R,G,B,A - it will improve the "depth-based fog in comp" kind of usage considerably.

If you do want to normalize the depths, you could put the near & far values into the header's metadata.

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 1:40 PM, Paul Miller <address@hidden> wrote:

On 3/14/2012 1:51 PM, Christian Bloch wrote:

'Z' layer seems to be the de-facto standard, analog to the single channel 'A' for Alpha, but as full-float buffer. That's what I scripted into the output pipeline here at EdenFX, and it drops right into the correct slot in Fusion.

Thanks. Already have it hooked up in my I/O module. I don't suppose there is any standard to the depth range? Or is it common to have a scale/bias somewhere in each application?

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