Saveable DOF

[restoeboemi]

A saveable DOF like irradiance map would be very useful and speed up rendering much faster.

[Dusan_Pavlicek]

But is that at all possible? I believe that the DOF part of the rendering can't be separated from the rest so easily as for example the irradiance maps. Or it can but then the "blurred" parts would not match the rest of the rendering when something is changed...

[super gnu]

pretty impossible i think.. d.o.f. is a raytraced effect and cannot be pre-calculated or re-used like an irradiance map... since it affects, directly, every pixel in the image, youd have to store every bit of every frame in your 'dof map' and the moment u changed anything at all, youd have to recalculate... which would kinda defeat the purpose of pre calculating it...

[Long John]

a z-buffer approach like frischluft lenscare or X-DOF would be great for still images.

not perfect in any case but good enough i think.

and when you change the materials or light situation you don´t have to calculate the complete dof again.

would make a nice addition to vray.

[dbuchhofer]

There was an interesting Siggraph sketch this year about a much better looking post process dof based on Gubffers..

Was under:
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Accurate Depth-of-Field Post Processing
A new post-process technique for high-quality depth of field to minimize 3D rendering time, avoid noisy sampling, and allow changes to the focus without additional rendering.

Garrick Meeker
Industrial Light + Magic
gmeeker@ilm.com
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Don't have the cd here to dig up the details, but looked like an interesting alternative to that evil rpf motion blur and the (relatively) slow real motion blur ..