So I promise I’m going to get some 3D content this week! I know! I’ve been promising it for a while, and work finally seems like it’s going to be a little slow for once this month. I know I’ve been saying that for a while now, but I think it’s finally true.
Anyways… to business! So I’ve recently purchased a Nikon D7000 and have been a little trigger happy with it. So I’ve uploaded some new shots taken with it to the Flickr page. I’ve also been following two photographers for a while now, and I thought I’d share their portfolio’s with you.
The first Photographer is Lisa Bettany (aka MostlyLisa). You can find her work at www.mostlylisa.com, and she also as a pod/video-cast up at http://twit.tv/photo. Her work is absolutely amazing, and she also give a lot of good tips on her blog. So give her a look!
The second Photographer is Trey Ratcliff. You can view his work here: www.stuckincustoms.com. He specializes in HDR Photography. And I haven’t seen anyone else come even close to this level. His images are just breathtaking. And the cool thing is, his site is just full of tips and techniques on how he does his images in post-production. Not only that, he’s about to start up a 3 week, 9-class, webinar that goes over his whole workflow from start to finish! I’ve already signed up for it, so I’ll report back later on how it goes!
And now here’s a teaser for the Flickr Page!
Ok! Still with me? So now for some 3D tips! I’m going to be creating a more detailed blog post for all this tomorrow. But incase I don’t get to it, here it is in text form at least.
So the best way I’ve found to render out a Z-depth pass is to render it as a 32-bit EXR. Why not just a jpeg or tga you say? If you save out your Zdepth pass as a 32-bit image, that is unclamped (and that is KEY), you’ll be able to change your min and maximum distance in Photoshop with the exposure control! Hard to imagine, but you won’t have to re-render the Z-Depth pass at all! If it didn’t come out exactly like you wanted it to, that’s ok. Just open up the exposure control in Photoshop and play with the Exposure, Offset and Gamma. Each slider does something a little different, so you’ll have to play around to get the effect you are looking for. Once you do that, just copy the Z-depth pass to your PSD’s Alpha channel, and apply the Lens Blur filter like normal.
Now I’m not familiar with Mental Ray too much. But when you add the Z-Depth pass in V-Ray, you have to uncheck “clamp z-depth”. If you don’t the exposure command won’t work like it should. Also, when you save out the Z-depth, you’ll want to make sure you set the “TYPE” from “RGBA” to “RGB” (only if you plan on going into Photoshop). Doing this won’t save the alpha channel with the Z-Depth pass. You will have holes in your image if you do this, and it is a pain to clean up and to get right.
Again, I’m going to write up some steps with some images later to better explain myself. Though if you have any questions, feel free to email myself!
-Scott
