Another Z Composite Question - Running Out Of Time!

[user_deleted]

I know there's a lot of posts on here about this but i can't find one that's particularly relevant. We use After Effects but didn't realise until too late that it could not read .iff zdepth. So we had to use Shake on a mac for the first time and managed to use z composite to sort out our layers. The problem is with the aliased edges. I know that we cant blur or use AA on the Z channel because of the need for whole number values. Can we somehow use the alpha channels for what is to be displayed, but controlled by the Z-depth? This would get rid of the aliasing but keep the composition layering right. Failing that, what is the best way to get rid of these edges as it is a huge blemish on an otherwise well made scene, which is to be presented on thursday..!

Thanks,

Sam

[user_deleted]

try Smooth Gredients from RE:Fill Revision Effects. it works amazing!!

[user_deleted]

Is there a trial version to download?

[joojaa]

pull a z key, dilate it slightly (by a pixel or so) and multiply it by the alpha (or edgedetect and diallate and multiply by coverage), use this as key for the comp.

if you have multiple overlapping alphas you need to convert them to coverage first then you need to do a edge detect and use the diallated edge for coverage calculation. (you should render coverage mr does this btw)

(or my favorite render out the oversampling into a file and pull the key form there and the reconstruct in your 2d comp, this works well with maya sw and renderman but pulling it out of MR is slightly trickyer but it works just remeber to bring the sample ranges to negative and bring the image output larger, it should take equal amount of time to render since its the same operation just ses a bit more memory during render thats all)