This shot shows me lining up hazmat suited workers in deep space in After Effects. The top layer is the background set to a blend mode of difference. Once the individual layers are lined up along the Z axis of depth they turn black when scaled up to the size they should be.
I had tried to create this scene in VoluMax Pro using projection mode. With that set up the ground would be projected on a plane set at 90 degrees relative to the theme park background in the distance. That set up worked but it was overkill for what I needed to accomplish with the shot which was less than a second long. With the projection ground place set up I could have zoomed in and the ground plane would work in perspective. There really wasn’t time for a long zoom effect. I just needed to pan down to the workers in the foreground caring the body bag.
I set the shot up traditionally in After Effects instead and it worked fine. At this point since most characters are in long shots there hadn’t been much of a need to apply depth maps to the people. It really isn’t noticeable that the character have depth unless the camera tracks left to right. Due to this the shots are getting more depth as I progress since I am learning how to accomplish depth maps that work best as I go. This stylistic progression is coming about from my learning curve.