Anyone know how to render smoke z pass without volume/transparent? like fumefx. I think z pass really important in compositing smoke.
Z pass like this.
Not sure. Otherwise you could fake it by front lighting the smoke on its own layer?
smoke needs deep compositing to sit perfectly in the compositor, deep compositing is not yet supported in blender.
I’m asking for z-depth, not deep compositing. Deep compositing worked great when you adding smoke on top of smoke.
But as you can see in my example we can still composite something inside the smoke if we have z-pass.
It shows what’s behind volume itselfs by transparency, so it seems OK to me. The right image shows a z-pass of the mesh and not the volume, that’s not really what you’re asking and I didn’t suceed to get the same result than you’re first image of the topic but I’m sure it’s possible with the right node setup or OSL script.
The right image(mesh) only an example what it should look like. The z-pass from the left image is not true z-depth pass.
It’s exactly what does an anti aliased render of the z-pass behind semi-transparency areas. With volume, of course, everything is semi-transparent. Sometime you need those values, sometime not and I didn’t figured out yet how to render only maximum value of volume in Cycles. However, like 3pointEdit said, you can use a light from the camera location and with Blender Internal, in the lighting panel of the material, active the shadeless mode and set “RGB to intensity” in Voxel Data texture to make the volume look solid and you’ll get something close to what you’re looking for (but this is just fake and doesn’t match to the real depth value).