Getting the true z value from the depth buffer

Question

Sampling from a depth buffer in a shader returns values between 0 and 1, as expected. Given the near- and far- clip planes of the camera, how do I calculate the true z value

Answer 1

I know this is an old, old question, but I've found myself back here more than once on various occasions, so I thought I'd share my code that does the forward and reverse conversions.

This is based on @Calvin1602's answer. These work in GLSL or plain old C code.

uniform float zNear = 0.1;
uniform float zFar = 500.0;

// depthSample from depthTexture.r, for instance
float linearDepth(float depthSample)
{
    depthSample = 2.0 * depthSample - 1.0;
    float zLinear = 2.0 * zNear * zFar / (zFar + zNear - depthSample * (zFar - zNear));
    return zLinear;
}

// result suitable for assigning to gl_FragDepth
float depthSample(float linearDepth)
{
    float nonLinearDepth = (zFar + zNear - 2.0 * zNear * zFar / linearDepth) / (zFar - zNear);
    nonLinearDepth = (nonLinearDepth + 1.0) / 2.0;
    return nonLinearDepth;
}