ENDA Episode 178→ The time when ENDA tells a little secret called: Deep Anything (Part 1)

Live-action plates don’t come with a depth pass.

That was one of the first things I had to get used to when I started working more with live-action footage.

So creating your own depth of field was up to you. It wasn’t impossible, just more tedious, especially if your shot had a lot of camera movement.

But while training under the Dark King of VFX at Alpha Chromatica, I came across a particular node that makes life much easier when it comes to ZDepth: Deep Anything by Rafael Silva.

In the video below, you can see how the node generates a depth pass directly from the RGB information of the plate. On top of that, you can adjust the Far and Near parameters to control the depth range, even before plugging it into a ZDefocus node.

Ideally, you would then export this pass as an EXR sequence, so it can be used properly in the final comp.

This already saves a lot of time compared to creating a depth pass manually with other methods, like isolating the luminance or alpha channels and stacking roto shapes to simulate areas that are closer to, or further from, the camera lens.

But what if I told you there’s a second application for this ZDepth pass?

Well, that will be for a future episode…

The journey continues...

Deep Anything download: https://github.com/rafaelperez/Depth-Anything-for-Nuke