Lenscare advice

[stevesideas]

Hi guys,

Im currently looking into using lenscare for an animation. From past experience using it at another studio I found there were problems with severe jaggies because of the zdepth being aliased. The result was very noticable jaggies in the final image if there were large differences of focus being used.

Is there a way around this. Does Richard Rosenman dof gen pro do this also ? Would I have to render out the zdepth to 2x that of the normal image ?

Any advice is appreciated.

Cheers

[Paul Oblomov]

I think you need to render against black or white background all your elements involved in dof and don't forget to enable filtering in your render elements OR you might try to choke z-buff and layer dof applied to. Maybe this will remove aliasing...

[stevesideas]

I was hoping to use a single zdepth grayscale image rather than having to faff around with layering up. This is for an animation also and that technique would prove to time costly.

I thought turning on filtering causes problems when using the depth buffer ?

[JeffG2]

DofPro will anti-alias your zbuffer.

In my experience DofPro works better than Lenscare - but it is slower.

[stevesideas]

Ok, but can DOFpro work with animations ? Can it be used in say, aftereffects ?

[miraldo]

Ok, but can DOFpro work with animations ? Can it be used in say, aftereffects ?

It does work with animations, and delivers excellent results.
Although its not the most straightforward method, since you have to batch process the frames from the plugin interface inside photoshop. Nevertheless, it does deliver a very reliable result and it's very flexible, as it allows the keyframing of all of the attributes.
I've been using it flawlessly on a number of projects, and I must say I'm very pleased with this great tool.

Besides anti-aliasing the depth map, Richard Rosenman suggests an effective process for getting rid of jaggies and artefacts on complex situations: http://www.dofpro.com/complexgallery.htm

[stevesideas]

Cheers for the advice. Im confused...how do you keyframe batches of images from within photoshop ? Does DOFpro have a timeline ?

[miraldo]

Yes, DOFpro has its own timeline. After configuring the DOF parameters, and optionally keyframe them over time (I mainly animate the focus depth), you can preview any given frame and then start the batch process.

[JeffG2]

process for getting rid of jaggies and artefacts on complex situations: http://www.dofpro.com/complexgallery.htm

Wow. Really smart. I never would have thought to pre-dof the zbuffer!

[stevesideas]

The only thing im concerned about is the fact that it seems DOF pro will not run on a winxp64 system. It would be a complete pain switching from one system to the other to test the DOF.

[miraldo]

DOFpro v4.0 is currently on its final stages of development, and it might address that problem...

http://www.dofpro.com/forum/viewtopi...5d229bcb479099

[stevesideas]

Thanks for the link. Looks promising. I took the plunge and bought it. Cheers