Hi All,
I am trying to make use of After Effects ability to process 3D data in the form of a RPF/RLA file format. I notice that Blender can not render to this format. Is there any other file format that can contain Rich Pixel Information. This infomation is mainly object ID, material ID and Z-space.
It looks like only 3DSMax and Lightwave support this style of output. Seems a shame, because all the information is contained in the render layers of Blender.
OpenEXR might be something you can use. Not sure if this will tell you much about how, but here’s a thread where this came up before:
I tried OpenEXR, it didn’t work. I tried every output format that Blender offers.
None of them produced any channels that the After Effects 3D Channel effect could detect.
MultiLayered OpenExr should do it. I know that a composition program called NUK opens them perfectly. Don´t know about AfterFX. Have you tried with Combustion?
jbbouza,
Can you upload a BLEND with you openEXR settings? Perhaps I did not set it up correctly. I can only give it a try in After Effects because that is all I have.
Rich Pixel Information. This infomation is mainly object ID, material ID and Z-space :
you know those are really just masks, right?
just look at the object id’s 
hope that helps
You need to export your files as MULTILAYERED files, when you do that you get an option to save as an EXR. Now all the channel information you include as separate passes will be packed in the EXR.
now go to http://www.fnordware.com/OpenEXR/ and download the plugin, install it for AE and PS 
when you import an EXR with all the passes in it, select it in the project window, go to the file menu for AE and you should see a new option there for OpenEXR. It’'ll basically unpack all the pass information from the EXR into separate comps.
bear in mind though - the EXRs are all 32-bit, and if you use the combined pre-comp then your computer (unless you’re running some kind of superPC) will start to choke up, especially for RAM previews.
wow, cool plugin! 
found some instructions here too
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/aftereffects/articles/3d_integration_pt2_08.html
That’s because it’s a proprietary format. Blender doesn’t do material ID unless you compile in BeBraw’s patch: http://bebraw.googlepages.com/indexmat05.txt I requested it for the current build but did so too late (B-con 3). Multilayer Exr files are quite a bit more advanced than RLA/RPF but as don hin mentioned they’re 32bpc, generally resulting in MASSIVE files…particularly if you include multiple layers as opposed to single layers with multiple passes.
Thanks for all the info, but I still can not use any of the built in 3DChannel effects in After Effects with footage rendered from Blender.
The free plugins will get me mattes I can use in other ways, but if you are familiar with After Effects and the 3D plugins you will know that they accept no input other than RLA/RLE. Which is really Adobe’s fault. I closely examined those plugins trying to find a way to force feed them a matte to no avail.
I am going to try out those fnordware plugins anyway!
What are you trying to achieve?
For getting camera moves into AE from blender, use the maya ascii export script which can be found on this forum. IMHO it works better than RPF from max for this purpose.
For other passes, you can do as AMDBCG says and use the node compositor to split them out.
