wip: cheers!

[Long John]

I would say that the focus points are a little bit wonky (I'm no expert)

Since the focal area seems to be the center ship, why
would the plank to the left be so sharp when the ship in front of it is out
of focus... conversely, the plank directly under the focused ship is
defocused some, when one would expect it to be as sharp as the legs.

i think thats no problem.
the ships have a hight.
so the top of the ship is closer to the camera then the bottom.

that would bring the top more out of focus.

not?

[andre]

flipside: you clone the surface that you want drops on, assign it a drop material and add a displacement modifier. i used waterlevel to cut the drops and cellular as a 3d map.

andre

[flipside]

Thanks andre!

What actually does that water level do? I just clips of the lowest part o your surface? Or do you use alpha channels or something to remove the non-drop part of your cloned surface?

Thanks,

flipside

[Da_elf]

it clips the mesh

[andre]

flipside: imagine you want green slimey drops on a glass, but you don´t want the drops to intersect the glass. here you use waterlevel to clip the mesh.
you can always use maps to mask areas, or blend displacement-maps.

andre

[586]

Just a comment: the Frischluft products are super. I use Lenscare for faking DOF, and it works beautifully. As far as the "wonkiness" of the focus point goes, the Lenscare plug allows you to set the bias and intensity of the DOF, so if you want to pull out the foreground into full focus, you can - given that you're working with a good Z mask.

[andre]

how do you generate a good z-mask with vray? do you use rpf/rla or do you render a 2nd image?

[586]

From another thread (commented by me):

1. Check of the G-buffer channels you need This is in the Render Scene rollout under G-Buffer/Color Mapping
2. Save the output as RPF (again check what you need) This is in the Render Scene rollout under Common Parameters > Render Output > Files
3. Import the RPF sequence into combustion or AfterEffects

You can most probably extract any channel you wish from inside combustion, i use aftereffects and you can almost do it properly there, but i would think combustion has the ability to juggle around any rpf file.

Max itself cant save the Z-buffer to a 8 or 16 bit greyscale file, but i think there are some scripts around that might do it.
_________________
Eivind Nag
www.tryllefilm.no

Hope this helps. Another option would be to use a third party plug for DOF, such as X-DOF to output just the Z channel, but I think that plug is still a bit buggy w/ VRay.

[flipside]

I get an alpha channel like image when I do that. Maybe it's just easier to switch to max renderer if you want the z-depth info

[586]

I just edited my post to reflect some better information that was in another thread. You're right about the Max output of the depth channel - it leaves a lot to be desired. But, I don't have Combustion or AfterEffects, so I can't vouch for the quality of the Z channel in an RPF file.

[andre]

flipside: if you use the max-renderer it won´t work with vray-displaced objects and i am certain the object-edges will be different due to different sampling.
using the blur approach and render a fogged image with vray sounds more promising.

image: corrected the droplets, used vray-dof and lost patience

[GoncaloP]

You forgot a bucket

The look now is so much better...

Congrats,

Gonçalo

[Gijs]

This is really amazing high quality lighting/texturing/rendering!

very Nice work!

Gijs