Depth Of Field Generator PRO v1.0

[richard_rosenman]

Hey Vray friends;

I'm not sure if this is the right category to post this in, and if not, Natty, just go ahead and move it for me.

Depth of Field Generator PRO is the result of six months of research, development and programming collaboration between myself and Martin Vicanek in an effort to produce a plugin capable of delivering high quality, sophisticated Depth of Field and Bokeh effects quickly and efficiently as a post process.



Depth Of Field Generator PRO is a Photoshop plugin although it runs on various other applications capable of running Photoshop compatible filters. We've tried to get the best looking, most accurate DOF in a post process possible, with numerous tools for edge artefact reduction, and Bokeh accentuation.

The product homepage is here:
http://www.dofpro.com

The CG Samples page is here:
http://www.dofpro.com/cgigallery.htm

The Photo Samples page is here:
http://www.dofpro.com/photogallery.htm

And finally, the demo is here:
http://www.dofpro.com/software/dofpro.zip

Enjoy.

-Richard

[suurland]

Look really really good..

All you need to do is write a detailed tut on how to render out the depth map along side with your normal rendering using vray and you got yourself a customer

/Thomas

[jujubee]

Wow. It looks great. It looks like it has a lot of control.

All you need to do is write a detailed tut on how to render out the depth map along side with your normal rendering using vray

1) Download ChannelExtractor Script (even tho it's version 3 it still works on Max 7.) Load it into 'custom user interface\category\bobo's tools\' and assign shortcut.
2) Camera Clipping path near set to 0.
3) Camera Clipping path far set to scene boundary.
4) Save format to .RLA with z-depth option checked.
5) Disable Max Buffer.
6) Enable VFB (Vray Frame Buffer.)
7) Select 'Z-value' under G-Buffer.
Render out scene.
9) Load ChannelExtractor via shortcut you assigned. Select the RLA file. Split out the Z-depth into a .tga (or whatever you want.)
10) Done.

[richard_rosenman]

Hey Thomas - I actually switch to Max scanline for Depth Map rendering and assign everything white default materials. The edges match up fairly well, if you use a high enough aa in VRay.

I usually go into render elements, select add Z-Depth, and then specify the Z-Min and Z-Max settings (based on your camera settings). This will render a depth map from white to black. Don't worry about not having your focal point white and everything else black - this can be changed withing DOF PRO by clicking in the viewport or using a slider to change the Z-Depth focal point.

I plan on writing some tutorials next as several people have commented they feel the need for it.

-Richard

[Morbid Angel]

if vray can do 3d true dof, why need this? especilly if its only for ps?
there are quite a few plugins for ae, combustion that do the same thing base on zdepth anyway.

[jujubee]

Well- there are some transparency/opacity issues with these methods.

[richard_rosenman]

This is an alternative, not a replacement for VRay DOF. It is much faster because it is a post process, although not as accurate.

The Combustion, as well as most other post process DOF filters produce extremely poor results - some of them even using a gaussian blur for DOF. If you carefully study what DOF looks like, you will realize there are many factors in producing a realistic DOF effect, particularly bokeh, non-uniform blur (non-gaussian), diaphragm shape, size, curvature and rotation, and much more. I've studied these carefully, and we keep running into this problem in production - no good DOF generators.

We've used the Combustion DOF and it's extremely poor, along with many others. LensCare has a fairly good one and Iris is good too. Poor DOF may be sufficient for some, but not for me, or others looking for high quality DOF results.

-Richard

[Morbid Angel]

also seems like there is some kind of aa issues on the highlites
- richard I was thinking of plugin for combustion, cant remember execlty something like smart effects or real effects (maybe)

[Morbid Angel]

I'd rather love to see some kind of replacement for motion blur, i.e. vray motion blur is heavy and gives many exeptions in many cases, has hard time working with displacements and etc. Multipass is not an option for many cases. So, if there coulda been a plugin that would some how do almost 3d like quality moblur that would be way cool.
I know rsmb is not that good.
and i know about la maison shader and all the rest.

[richard_rosenman]

For us, motion blur is not nearly as heavy as DOF. For my Diet Pepsi spot http://www.richardrosenman.com/pepsico.htm our rendertimes shot from 1-2 hours without DOF to 8+ hours with. This has been the case with every project we've done in production and we ALWAYS have to skip the DOF. While it is a great feature to have, it's never been an option for us for production.

As for motion, we've tried ReelSmart and it can be good if you export the motion vectors with the Mental Ray MV export shader. But it suffers the same issues any post process filter does - less accurate results at a much faster speed. We also wrote our own post motion blur plugin for Softimage 3.x many years ago when working with MR and although it was fairly decent, transparency always got in the way, as well as edge artefacting.

-Richard

[Morbid Angel]

I agree. We also do pp dof. For moblur, if your geo sampling is at say 6 to be able to mimc curved motion blur then if vray doesnt run out of memory, renders take forever...

[flino2004]

how about finalDOF
http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPrevie....cfm/ID/259687

I don't know if it works with Vray...they say it is almost in real time

[suurland]

They say so many things

/Thomas

[Morbid Angel]

yeah...if you listen to cebas and how they "say" about thir fr stage1 is sooo great and etc...yack

[percydaman]

ive heard others say that final render stage 1 is pretty good. Problem is that everyone already left em well before stage 1.