OK, this might be an crazy idea, but since I have been thinking about it, I might as well share it.
Instead of have to use a ton of AA samples to clean up the blurred parts of DOF, why not fake it good with a GPU accelerated filter in the Frame Buffer? You render a depth pass of course, and then use that to enable a feature like NUKEs ZDefocus:
If we get really fancy, the feature might make it possible to change the focus point on the fly in the frame buffer and change the aperture/DOF too. It might require a different sort of depth pass, but I’m not clever enough to know any of that sort.
I understand that a proper rendered DOF is more realistic, but it might not always be needed, and we all love speed. Right?
I haven’t seen good post-processed DOF yet (except maybe Richard Rosenman’s plugin). VFB+ has a similar feature (not GPU as far as I know), but in my opinion it looks very unconvincing. In any case you can try it and tell me if a similar solution would work for you. I still think this is best left to other tools and not the renderer, but you never know…
I know what you mean regarding the general quality of post-processed DOF, but you guys are geniuses, so I thought that I might as well ask.
Yeah, I was looking for the functionality of something like VFB+ DOF feature, but I can see why you prefer the output of something like Richard Rosenman’s DOF PRO. That looks very good indeed.
But maybe people just prefer to use post-processed DOF in Photoshop/NUKE/Fusion, and then it would be a waste of your time. What do others think?
Unlike motion blur, at least for me, there’s no really big difference to do DOF in the render. 95% of the time its done in post, alot more control and no need to re-render if the client doesn’t like it.
+1 to both points made above.
If you want a really quick DoF/moblur/stereo RENDER, use the shademap (currently sitting in the stereo helper.).
And unless you need a very exact, multi-segment motion blur, you’re probably a lot more effective setting yourself up a comp which deals with it (i suppose there are examples on the internet for whichever post-app you chose to use) and then feeding it the new material.
While i surely can’t vouch for the effectiveness of a given solution, i can surely tell you that i hardly ever saw a shot come out with DoF and Moblur by default: rather, they were rendered with those effects as a very last resort when everything else failed, for whatever reason.
And even then, those shots would give some amount of grief to compers, and their AoVs treatment (read: most data channels become unusable…).
I didn’t even know about the shademap, and that looks like a great solution. There is so many features and tricks within Vray that it just takes time to learn about them all when you’re a new user. :o
