Depth Mattes

Hi guys,

Ive gone through the forum here looking for an answer to a problem im having with Depth mattes in shake. im totally new to shake and node based compositing. I come from the old school and ancient Jaleo system and recently have mucked around with Nuke (i cant use nuke anymore as my office was broken into and that nice computer is long gone)....anyway here is my problem.

im working on a 3D animation series and the Maya guys are giving me a bunch of files to comp together.

example (all in tif image sequence):

Character Color
Character Shadow
Character Background Shadow
Character Toon lines
Character Z Depth

Environment Color
Enivronment Z Depth

My problem is when i try and comp in the Z Depth file. I tried to follow the tutorial in shake and do those steps to the 3D stuff im working on and it hasn't worked.

right now im just comping the files together with a multilayer, leaving out the Z Depth for now and i get pretty much what i want that way but i do need to have those nasty Z Depth files in there, along with some motion blur (i think i got the motion blur handled but not to sure yet)

Can anyone out there help in explaining to me step by step what the heck i need to do to make these Z Depth files work.

Cheers
james