Deep image data, possible with mentalray?

[haggi]

To me sample passes store samples which contain the frame buffer values. So if you dont have the possiblity to write multiple positions in a frame buffer, the sample passes will not help, or am I wrong here?

[bart]

unless you structure your fbs to cover your depth complexity, spanning the range of the depth in which you're interested. We're talking about a lot of data. But typically, samples passes only exist for a short period of time before being processed, like a z composite per frame.

The key about formalized formats is the ability to have some sort of adaptibility for sparsely populated depth voxels.