Thank you guys. And huge thanks 3dickulus for plans on integrating Z-depth you mentioned in the main thread.
Let me elaborate more on what we need in the ideal world. Again, this is all coming from the desire of integrating fractals in the proper VFX pipelines.
Z-buffer- The Z-buffer is important for us because it allows us to play with the images in post production with quite a lot of flexibility. Not having Z-depth is working with tied hands.
- Same goes for transparency, but if there is a good Z-depth saved along with the images, it's easy to subtract the 'background' based on Z-depth in post. So Z-depth is crucial
Now we hit another point.
color depth for both main images and z-depth- I did not investigate that yet with Fragmentarium, but looking at what you said I recon currently there's only 8bpp output.
- the standard for VFX and postproduction pipelines require at least 16bits per channel. 8bpp limits image manipulation significantly.
- for demanding applications we go for 32bpp.
File formats- Generally we can work with anything - be it .png or .tiff or other formats. Crucial is to have sufficient color depth.
- Often .dpx files are being used. I might only assume these are not 'by default' supported by system, so adding may be a bit more time consuming. It is not a priority.
Saving Z-depth along with main imageLooking at the perspective of saving Z-Depth along with the images, I can suggest the following options to make it convenient:
→ (A) Worst case scenario, but still better than no Z-Depth: rendering both Z-depth and main to one image, one above the other. I could work with it, but it would add processing time to split this in post to make it usable.
→ (B) Simple and easy - outputting main and z-depth in 2 separate files, named commonly, only with "Z-buffer" suffix for ZD, followed by frame number
→ (C) Pro solution - I would suggest looking into OpenEXR format (
http://www.openexr.com/) developed by Industrial Light & Magic. It allows for various color depths, has compression algorithms, but what's most important here, it allows to save multiple layers into the same file and is being often used in post-productions pipelines. Today we speak about saving only Z-buffer along and we can live with separate file outputs. But looking towards a future-proof solution, OpenEXR will be a great choice allowing to save many different channels/layers into same file efficiently.
At what depth you are handling the buffer? Are we limited on the buffer level or that's just a matter of saving to file bottleneck?
Just my suggestions for the future development.
Hope this is anyhow helpful.