wigal123
SESI confirmed today, that this is indeed intentional behavior.
I put in a RFE to make the preservation of shading optional.
Do other people think this would be useful as well?

wigal123
Yes, deep camera maps render as expected.

Wolfwood

wigal123
Yes, deep camera maps render as expected.

What happens if you turn off DSM Optimize Shading?

Monday, January 12, 2009
Houdini 9.7.161: There's a new mantra property, DSM Optimize Shading (vm_dsmoptimize). This setting is on by default and will cause more efficient shading when rendering deep shadow maps. It does this by ignoring most changes to the surface color (thus eliminating many illuminance and ray-tracing calls).
However, in order to generate beauty pass images at the same time as generating deep shadow maps (i.e. from a camera), mantra should shade both the color and opacity of the surface. Thus, the optimization should be turned off.

For example, to generate both a DSM and a beauty image from a single camera:

Add the “Deep Resolver” (vm_deepresolver) property to the camera and set it to “Deep Shadow Resolver”
Add the “DSM Filename” (vm_dsmfilename) property to the camera and set it to point to the desired output image
Add the “DSM Optimize Shading” (vm_dsmoptimize) property to the camera and turn optimization off
Then, when you render from the camera, a DSM should be created along with the beauty image.