Frischluft and depth of field effect in After Effects

[tricky]

Anyone using Frischluft Depth of Field to add a depth of field effect using a z Depth render pass? I've been trying to use this approach for a LONG time and never achieved the look I am after. I wonder if anyone had any tips?

In a nutshell, I want the foreground of a scene to be thrown out of focus but the mid-to-background be sharp. I render a Z Depth pass using VRay in the expected way and have the FL plugin derive its z depth data from this. Regardless of the settings, I cannot seem to get the foreground blurry and the background sharp. Is this just impossible using a post effect (because we are trying to see sharp stuff 'through' blurry stuff)?

[Raven]

I think we need more info or an example.
How drastic is the blurring you want in the foreground. When you say looking through blurry stuff, are they blocking large amounts of the scene.
No post depth of field can do really drastic depth of field (unless you are going into deep compositing)

[andybot_cg]

Could you adjust the zdepth pass first and adjust the value (levels) of the background to a similar gray as what you have in the mid-range? Then it would trick the DOF effect into setting the background in focus as well. At least that's how I would do it in Photoshop. Not sure about after effects - would you be able to add a mask to the pass before it's used for DOF?

[glorybound]

If black is out of focus and white is in focus, where you want out of focus to start would be your MAX distance. You would need to invert it in AE. Unless I am totally missing your question.

[WimOos]

I don't have After Effects in front of me now, so it may not be 100% accurate the way I describe it - you need to right click on the z-pass, click on interpret footage, it will open a window with 2 inner windows (first one is how it deals with alpha, 2nd window deals with color management, click Preserve RGB in that windows. Then in your frischluft itself you can adjust the z-pass with depth buffer. hope it works!