Hey there @brecht !
I’m a VFX professional and a very long-time Blender user. I have a generalist 3D skillset but I am specialized as a digital compositor. I love the Cycles engine and have found it to be very capable, you fine folks are getting closer and closer to feature parity with the commercial render engines, slowly but surely.
The fact that progress is being made is fantastic, you folks are great developers. However, I can’t help but feel that it’s taking too long to implement support for Deep Output with absolutely no indication that it’s in the works or being seriously considered.
There are other things like light selects and built-in World, Object, refWorld and refObject position passes(without having to do strange conversions and workarounds to make them sort of work in comp packages) that also need implementing but Deep Output is a big one. OpenEXR supports the reading and writing of Deep data and has reasonably clear documentation.
I’m aware that generating Deep data and being able to write it are two different things of course. Given that almost all the major engines and packages support Deep Output by now, what exactly is it going to take to get it implemented as a utility pass in Cycles? Looking around, some of the previous mentions of feature requests for it go back as far as 12+ months.
I really don’t mean any offence but non-answers and skirting around the subject have been incredibly frustrating. I genuinely enjoy using Blender and Cycles and believe that having Deep Output would take what is a great render engine and get it on the path to become an amazing render engine that studios would have to be crazy not to adopt, promote and contribute towards.
Kindest Regards & Respects,
Alan