Exporting Depth in Singlelayer EXR

Support Compositing and Post Processing
1

I have to get RGBA, Depth and IDs into Nuke for Compositing but I can’t use Multilayer EXRs or FileOutput Nodes because of Renderfarm restrictions. I want to use Singlelayer EXRs and I managed to embed the IDs in the Alpha channel.

So now I have to output the Z buffer and I noticed a checkbox “Z Buffer” below the Output Settings. But Nuke/Fusion are reading the Z channel as full White. It even says in the Tooltip that the channel is 32Bit but it looks like it is 8bit (clipped).
When I use Multilayer EXRs I don’t have to do any aditional setup and the Z Buffer works fine. And if I look at the Z Buffer in the Blender Compositor it looks fine too.

Has anyone worked with this setup before and can help me with this?
Best regards,
Cubezz

2

If everything is further from the camera than 1.0 units, it will display white in nuke because viewer LUTs usually clip at 1.0 value (value of 1.0 represents maximum display brightness). But the data is there, you can easily see it by either lowering exposure in viewer or simply sampling the pixel values. Use appropriate depth type in ZDefocus node, it is named “direct” or similar, can’t remember from top of my head. if your comper can’t work with this data, find a better comper :smiley: