Add depth to your shot, not just camera movement. Depth Map generates an EXR sequence describing the visible scene in front of the tracked camera. CreativeTrack can connect it to the shot’s Composure plate in Unreal Engine 5.8.
Depth is optional. Leave it off for a camera-only solve, point-cloud export or mesh workflow that does not need depth compositing.
Generate depth for a shot
- Check a short camera solve first. Depth uses the solved camera motion, so confirm that the camera tracks the footage correctly.
- Enable Depth Map in Tracking Settings.
- Confirm the frame range and output folder. The depth, camera and plate must cover the same shot.
- Run Track Shot and let depth processing and export finish.
- Open
Media/Utility/Depthin the Job Folder. Check for the EXR frames anddepth_manifest.json. - Use Auto Import or import the scene JSON, then check the camera, media and depth setup in Unreal.
Understand the depth data
| Property | Exported value |
|---|---|
| Units | Meters. |
| Measurement | Camera-space Z: depth along the camera’s forward optical axis, not distance along each pixel’s viewing ray. |
| Format | EXR, with 32-bit floating-point depth values. |
| Channels | The same depth in R and Z, for Unreal and conventional depth workflows. |
| Unreal scale | Import metadata provides the meters-to-centimeters conversion. |
Depth EXRs contain numbers, not display-ready color. Keep the original values intact: do not apply gamma, grading or a display color transform before using them as depth. Use a separate viewer display or normalization for visual inspection.
Automatic depth setup in Composure
For a depth-compositing scene, CreativeTrack creates a Composite Depth Mesh driven by the exported sequence and assigns it to the Composure plate. Keep the camera, plate and depth synchronized so they describe the same frame and scene geometry.
Check the start, middle and end, then inspect moving edges and foreground/background boundaries. Depth is estimated and may need shot-specific refinement around difficult surfaces. Always review the final composite.
Combine depth with lens correction
When you use lens correction, CreativeTrack keeps the original depth and can create a separate corrected sequence in Media/Utility/DepthUndistorted. That sequence matches the corrected camera geometry used for projection.
Use the sequence recorded in the scene JSON rather than swapping raw and corrected files by hand. The correction remap sets invalid samples and samples outside the source footprint to zero. It does not interpolate across holes.
Check the physical scale
Metric output does not mean surveyed accuracy. Physical scale is estimated unless you anchor the shot to an independent reference. Use a measured distance or surveyed scene reference when your production needs known real-world scale.
If depth, its manifest or unit information is missing at import, keep the job intact and read its Logs. Use troubleshooting and the file reference to find the missing dependency.
