Off the wall question…

Can mantra be setup to sort pixels by camera distance? I'm trying to remap zdepth so that closer values are at the top and pixels farther away are at the bottom of the screen.

I've done this in past with Max/Vray (although the engine and host app doesnt matter) and very very tedious Photoshop script. I setup guides vertically every nth pixel on the image file (say 72). Then make a white to black gradient bar just a few pixels wide that spanned the height of the image. Next select a color range in the top guide (range bin 1) and use that range to select color from the rendered zdepth image. Free transform (squish and move up) the selected pixels vertically into the respective range bin. Now do it allll over again for each range bin and each image in the sequence. Luckily the PS script worked pretty well so I only had to do the first image manually.

I'm still really new to Mantra but I figured with as flexible it is that there might be a way to do it without the incredibly tedious post process!