I'm very green at Maya; in fact, I just downloaded my first trial copy this afternoon and started playing with it.

My goal is to render a scene's Z-depth information (only). In fact, that's all I'm interested in. I'm fine exporting it as a grayscale JPEG. However, whenever I try to render the Z-depth, the image comes out jet black. So....there's obviously something (dumb) I'm doing wrong.

To speed up the process and make it easier on everyone who may be so kind as to answer, I uploaded what I did to YouTube.

YouTube - ScreenCapture 5 8 2011 12 29 11 AM

Sorry, you may need to go full-screen to be able to see what I'm doing.

Any thoughts?