Depth of Field (DOF)

V-Ray for 3ds Max V-Ray for 3ds Max :: General
1

I am trying to get a strong DOF on the foreground. What am I doing wrong?

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light house - northeast.jpg
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2

i think you have to try lower f-stops. try say 0.2 or something. thing is, on an architectural scale scene youre not going to really get a shallow depth of field with a normal camera setting. either scale the scene down to macro sizes and use natural cam settings, or keep it the same size, and use unnatural cam settings.

i usually adjust fstop/shutter speed to get dof/ moblur correct, then adjust iso to get exposure correct.

3

nice render by the way :slight_smile:

sure you want heavy DOF? itll make it look like a miniature.. maybe thats the idea though :wink:

4

the DOF indicators do not exactly show the area of “focus” in the intuitively accurate way you might expect unfortunately. I’m guessing it’s a scene scale thing. Try an even lower f-stop?

5

you could do that in photoshop very quickly with a gradient mask and the lens blur filter.

6

I guess I want to use this scene to play with DOF, and not actually use the results unless it works. I never thought about lowering the f-stop below a real value, but I guess it makes sense, since I am trying to create an un-realistic effect. So, basically, I would have to have something really close to the camera for this to work. My goal is to create something realistic, yet interesting, on my scenes.

7

tilt-shift

This works good. You can do the same thing in Photoshop, using a gradient and blur (as mentioned above), but this is much more fun![

http://tiltshiftmaker.com/](http://tiltshiftmaker.com/)

8

Just about the easiest approach is to render the z-bufffer pass and use that as a mask in PS. Then save it as a channel and load it (z-buffer channel) as a mask to use the camera blur filter.

9

I second lowering the f-stop…those settings there are a simulation, they aren’t a real camera so you can go as low or high as you want…PS DOF is pretty sketchy at best, but for just trying out different levels of blurriness it’s fine.

10

if you really want to do DOF in post, frischluft lenscare is the only way to go :slight_smile:

11

Or Richard Rosenman’s DofPro;)

For me, too much guesswork and time wasted doing dof in render. Not to mention longer render times…

12

I own a seat, and used it a couple times, but not for awhile now. I never got the animating DOF to work in it.

13

I use dofpro as well, in my render elements I like to have around 4-6 z-buffers so i can combine Dof effects as well as fog…to me in my workflow having DOF directly from vraycam is not an option.

14

no way to use that in AE yet though right?

15

Lenscare by Frischfruch is an option for you for AE :slight_smile:

16

I thought that lowering the f-stops too low makes render times longer, but maybe I mistook that?

Your zoom factor or rather lens length is much to low for blurring this kind of big architectural object. You could position your camera farther away and zoom in, change lens length to - say - 100 or 200 and you will naturally get a stronger bokeh. but of course the look of the scene will change too.

but I would also just do a z-depth pass and freely change the blur in post.

17

There’s preregrine labs’ bokeh these days. Does a very good job and in nuke 6.3 even supports deepimg images. With the upcoming vray support that might be fun to play with :slight_smile:

Plus it’s dead cheap in comparison with lenscare…and it’s nuke native (YAY) :slight_smile:

Regards,
Thorsten

18

buying lenscare is cheaper than buying nuke though :slight_smile:

19

Not if you have a renderfarm… :stuck_out_tongue:

The sitelicense option is incredibly fair. You get a sitelicense for the cost of 4(!) Lenscare licenses hehe

From a technical standpoint the bigger issue is beeing native vs. beeing ofx tho.

Am looking forward to try deepimage support (available in the 6.3 version already) as soon as VRay support is available :slight_smile:

Regards,
Thorsten

20

second for lenscare (as a z-depth option)