This is the depth map for the shot called Stealth Wave. Anything close to the camera is light and anything far away get darker. The large grey mass towering over the figure is a wave. The metal I-beam structures on the beach are for stopping armored vehicles.
The process of creating the 2.5D shot is incredibly simple. I import the jpg of the painting into Photoshop. A script was used in the actions menu to create the grey scale depth map. I just push a butting and it is automatically generated. I use this technique for most of the simpler shots which don’t have complicated camera moves.
The main disadvantage of this technique is that there is often one spot which gets distorted when the camera moves. In that case I have to go back and create a mask to kill the distortion.
I had a major setback 2 days ago and had to re-edit 18 shots back into the Premiere pro final timeline. Since I had just recently done all the shots, It was a quick process to re-create them. Yesterday work progresses without a hitch and the shots are looking better than I imagined they could.
I can’t see the 3d effect in real time, so I just look at the first frame and the last frame and then imagine the movement between them. I then do a render of the scene and I am getting better at judging how much parallax to ass before the shot breaks down.
With a shot like this stealth wave, little can go wrong since there are three clear shapes, a foreground, mid ground and background.