Maya and RLa

[joshshenoy]

How do I get my maya rendered files to work with depth in combustion, My max rendered files work fine but my maya rendered file do not.

[incube]

Not to state the obvious, but do you have a RPF exporter? Max works because it will deal with Rich Pixel Format images. I don't know if one exist for Maya or not. As far as I know, this is the only way to get a 3D image (that will act 3D) into Combustion. I'm new to it too, so if this is of no help-sorry!

[crj]

The .rla standard as I understand it is not a very firm standard. The numeric range by wich an .rla sets its depth values into varries between programs. I read about this first in the read me file that comes with After effects 4.1. After Effects in 4.1 added some very rudamentary .rla effect in that releases 4.1 production bundel. I tried to set up these effects with max and I couldn't get reliable results so I checked the documentation and found:

Note: 3D channel files vary significantly in range of 3D channel values used. By default, the 3D channel effects use a range of values that encompass the outlying values. In practice, however, you

[mads-tuxen]

i dont believe you can. try using your z depth
files as stencils (for fog effects) or channels
for a compound blur?

[joshshenoy]

What really need is a plugin to read maya rla files, maby there is such a plugin for Pshop? or Ae?

[lovefailer]

I spoke with Alias and they know of this issue.
at the moment, there is not apparent fix.

[zqw]

So, am I understanding this correctly that RLA files rendered out of Maya do not contain a usable depth channel? Is this why I'm pulling my hair out trying to get my Maya RLA layers to sort in Z? Is there any kind of a work around?

[lovefailer]

basically the RLA or RPF (rich pixel format) is an extended/modified version
of RLA which is only produced out of Studio MAX...I spoke with Alias and they know of the issue, yet at this time is not currently be attended to.
The work around? use max... haha

[nodalfrodo]

There is a way to do this with Maya's flipbook tool, fcheck. It will allow you to extract the z pic into a seperate file (kind of greenish, still needs to be knocked to grayscale), which you can then import as a mask or what have you. It's been a while since we did this, but it did work. No, not a zpic as such, but a grayscale image (or sequence) that you should be able to use for all of the same purposes. Our .bat file line was something like
fcheck -n 301 523 1 -Z c:tempextext22.@.rla
The -Z flag forces display of the zpic.
This may or may not be all you need in your command to make it work. This is just off the top of my head.