I have a background in VFX and I realize that I’m using Unreal differently than intended. Nonetheless, I want to export a modified version of the Scene Depth World Units from the Sequencer to composite depth of field and/or fog manually outside of Unreal.
Is there a way to customize the near and far values for the Scene Depth World Unitspass? Since I have a massive landscape, the default is basically just white.
If the above is not possible, what about using the Custom Depth pass? I created a custom depth post-process material. This works fine for depth but overrides the default Lit view if added to the PostProcessVolume. I want to be able to apply this material simply to the Custom Depth Pass so it exports a separate pass from the Sequencer. Is there a way to do this? I enabled Render CustomDepth Pass in the LandscapeStreamingProxy object, but there is nowhere that I see to apply a material here.
If you export as an EXR file and turn on world depth in “deferred rendering” (this is using the ‘movie render q’ not the sequence exporter) you should be able to use the EXtractOR plugin in after effects or its equivalent to make what you’re after. Drop EXtractoR on the resulting EXR sequence, choose the baked in world depth layer, and adjust the black and white values.
Where it stops for me, however, is that I can’t find a way to get this or anything like it out of Unreal WITH multisampled motion blur and good DOF enabled. If you manually disable all temporal accumulation and enable antialiasing with override=true and method=none and crank temporal sample count up, you get some great DOF and motion blur results right out of unreal. What I really want is a depth pass that matches that render. I can’t seem to find a way to do that though.
I forgot that I’d posted this question, but thanks for your reply. What I ended up doing was creating my own custom Z Depth material and applied that to all the geometry. It’s a hassle to have to render that way and I’m not sure if there’s a way to do this automatically. What I really want is a Maya-style render layer system. If Unreal is to become a robust VFX tool, it’s going to need those types of features. Unless I’m missing something!
Anyway, to make the custom material, I used a Scene Depth texture and ran that through Multiply and Power nodes and clamped the final result. This was attached to the Emissive Color. This preserves motion blur and DoF.