Z-depth for Photoshop Use this method to bring models into Photoshop and integrate your images and background with photographic depth, fog-like effects, fades into the distance, etc. Set up a camera in Max to view your scene ... we are using a house. Top view -- use the measure tool to measure the front and back of your scene from the camera. The closest to the camera tape is about 11, the farther one is about 23. Add z-depth render element ... Set min and max Your render basic image render ... ... will now also include this z-depth element render: I like to render to an unsaved file and save as from there ... that way we can take a look at them first ... It’s going to be easiest to save them all like this, but you could do with 8-bit optimized for the z-depth and alpha renders. Render an alpha channel also while you are at it, also from the render elements tab. Bring all 3 files into Photoshop ... convert the z-depth and the alpha images to grayscale Select All and copy-paste the background layers of each of the render elements [z-depth and alpha] into new alpha channels in the house image. Your new channels for the house image will then look like this; name them something meaningful ... Go to layers and select the alpha channel ... Delete the background so you see white, or whatever your background image/color is. Now you have a depth selection, you can add a color to it, an image, a blur ... whatever! Here we just added white here we added blue ... Here we added a Gaussian blur ... you can see the house blurs as it recedes ... Here we put a sky background in, made sure our z-depth was inverse-selected, then added a layer mask to hide the selection ... now we have a ghost house ... I duplicated the selection to strengthen the effect. |
