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great shader, use it all the time. I can never get shake to do zdepth right,
and this let's me tweak it out before rendering. renders super fast, so to
me it's worth it over using the z-channel. Also works in maya 8-OSX!
Youdont need to guess you can measure the values in 3d! But more importantly this is extra work as maya gets the zdepth value for free.
And you dont need to convert them to grayscale images unless you happen to work on AE. Since both shake and Digital Fusion can do this natively, out of any zbuffered maya image.
Also in maya aswell as mentalray they represent TRUE floatingpoint ranges! So ateast 2 of 4 observations on tha uthors page a re questionable.
However the zbuffer isnt aaed as it shouldn be but with coverage this too can be fixed easily (and much more accurately)
Shader itself is not realy bad its actualy quite good at what it does its juts a bit unneccesery.
This is just one of those things theres SO much mystical info about tough the fact that maya uses -1/distance as zbuffer store isnt doing this any easier for people to understand since unless told most cant find this range and think its arbitrary
THis shader has however one benfit for the developper. He coult let teh same code put out cameraspace x and y cord too for nice slantted effects ;)
