Hello everyone,

Today I’m going to show you how to make a depth map. It’s very simple, and can be used for a variety of things, such as making stereograms, or “true 3D” pictures.

We’ll start with deleting our basic scene, by pressing “a” to select everything, and “x” to delete all. Then, press 7 on your numpad to put it in top down view, and then 5 to change from perspective to orthographic projection.

Then, add whatever object you want to make a depth map of, for this tutorial, we’re going to use Suzanne, the default monkey head.

Press shift->a and select mesh->Monkey to add a Monkey head. Go ahead and press Ctrl->1 to give it a subsurf modifier. And select set smooth in the tool bar.

Now, make sure the monkey is selected, and press “r” twice to enter trackball rotation. Rotate the monkey head until you find the angle you want.

Now we are going to add a texture to the monkey head. Start by going to the materials tab, and clicking “add new”. Then head over to the texture tab and press “add new”. Change the texture type from Cloud to Linear, and change the mapping coordinates to Global. Change all the mapping values to “Z”, and change the influence from Color to Emit.

Then add a camera using shift->a add camera, and move it up the z-axis. Render and you’ve got a depth map!

I hope you all enjoyed my first tutorial, and I hope to see your renders in the comments!