Depth map is no good with motion blur, how to improve?

Hi,

I want to render an animation, and wanted to use the depthmap for post production effects. I also want to use motion blur on the "diffuse" frames.

The depthmaps when rendered with motion blur is useless and wrong.

1. Is it fixable with a setting in poinTools?

2. Assuming no, can I render just the depthmaps?

Here is how the depthmap looks when motion blur is added to the diffuse frames:

(please note they are both saved in JPG because this forum does not allow BMP to be uploaded)

Here is how it looks when NO motion blur used:

(better but still horribly banded, good enough for my purpose but still really bad)

What to do???

  • HI Torben,
    I agree the depth map doesn't look right, and actually the more you improve the quality of the motion blur the worse it gets. We just tested and found that on 'insane' quality there was only 2 bands; black and grey. I will ask the dev team why this is + if it can be fixed.

    To answer your questions, no there is no setting to improve this, and no, you cannot render depth images without also rendering 'normal' images.

    The solution is to render twice:
    first with motion blur off to get your depth images, then delete the 'normal' images and just keep the depth images.
    second with motion blur on (but don't bother creating new depth images as you already have them)

    I think this would give you the desired result. However i haven't tried this, After Effects is not currently installed on my machine, so would be interested what you think about this solution and also your results.


    This is a test

  • I tested my solution, here is the result: https://youtu.be/X0Kl4FXI9cs
    I think a little more time spent adjusting the settings for the lens blur effect in AE would garner better results, but it's not bad :)


    This is a test