Z-depth pass

[vitos1k]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Zdepth channel could help with compositing 3d objects into IFS rendered environment
Exporting zdepth channel along side with image would help alot

Describe the solution you'd like
Proper antialiased zdepth channel saved in separate image file (32bit or 16bit) for further compositing

[bezo97]

Heya, I've experimented with zdepth before and the finding is that the result is very noisy most of the time. We'd need to do some kind of clever trick to denoise or average the depth to make it usable. I'll publish some results later

[vitos1k]

Hello, still no luck with this feature? I'm interested to take a look, but i'm not sure where to look into.

[vitos1k]

what if we store closest Z depth for each pixel on the screen, without avereaging, only the closest ones, would that still be noisy?

[bezo97]

Hi, no progress on this part. You can take it for sure, I'd be happy!
Storing the closest point's distance as zdepth was my very first try and it was incredibly noisy in most cases :(
To experiment with this you'll need to modify the compute shader to add a new buffer for the zdepth and on each splat update this buffer something like this.. zdepth[pixel_index] = min(zdepth[pixel_index], current_point_depth);

[johnuser8]

is there any update on this topic?

[bezo97]

@johnuser8 Nope, I can move this up in my priority list for the next release though. I still don't have a good idea for the noisy problem but maybe it will be useful to experiment with the noisy zdepth anyway

[bezo97]

Some progress, I'll need to work on it more but the basics works like this:
Example image:

Depth map:

• 32-bit float EXR file
• The value represents distance from camera, ie. 0 (black) is close to camera
• I adjusted exposure and contrast for visualization:

You can see the noise, this doesn't go away easily with more samples. But maybe this is already useful. @vitos1k @johnuser8