lp_Zmapper v1.0

'lp_' is not really the name inside of Nuke, it's more for organizing on a server/computer harddrive

Zmapper can help with the automatic generation of a depth-channel. This works kinda well on landscapes, but very poorly with most other footage. Aerial perspective always helps a lot.

The idea from this tool came from Mads Hagbarth Damsbos great tutorial on dehazing - I figured the generated matte could be somehow utilized to function on a depth map as well.

The main idea is to invert and desaturate the clip and drive it by a bilateral operation to maintain edge-detail; an erode/dilate operation helps with patching unwanted false-postives. This works well with landscapes that have a lot of aerial perspective, but not so well with other shots.it can normalize the output to only act between 0 and 1, to do this you need to analyze to footage first (this is implemented with a CurveTool). I suggest watching Hagbarths tutorial tu understand the underlying technique a bit better.

Needs Nuke 12 for the C_Bilateral node.

Mind the following examples, I used a simple ZDefocus to demonstrate what can be done with it; the examples are kinda sloppy, with more fine tuning you can get better results even from this stock footage :)

all images are free-to-use-stock from Pixabay