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depth of field


nino
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personally? hardly ever. but used correctly and subtly there's no reason why you shouldn't use it. it's only a lens effect and it's pretty subjective, but so many peeps over use it which makes it look just awful.

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yes i always use massive dof on most stuff tbh. my favourite is to get a bland scene, chuck in a designer chair, put the camera on the floor and do 5 renders of it with the chair half in focus. max out the bokeh as well, the more it looks like a circus the better. finish up with a gigantic soft glow and rgb offset by 2-5 pixels. maybe put a super dark gradient and some 'film grain' on as well.

 

done.

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Depends on your goal. If your going for photorealism a small amount of DOF really helps, too much and it can look like a small scale model plus adding some grunge helps a lot here.

But the all in focus super sharp and clean look can better show what the building will look like from a design point of view more like a diagram.

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yes i always use massive dof on most stuff tbh. my favourite is to get a bland scene, chuck in a designer chair, put the camera on the floor and do 5 renders of it with the chair half in focus. max out the bokeh as well, the more it looks like a circus the better. finish up with a gigantic soft glow and rgb offset by 2-5 pixels. maybe put a super dark gradient and some 'film grain' on as well.

 

done.

 

LMAO.

 

I think Alex Roman's recent film and images on his site are a perfect example when DOF can be used succesfully in arch viz.

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I think what makes Alex Romain's use of DOF so realistic is the fact that it kind of fades in and out of focus (animated). I wonder what the best way of achieving this is within the 3D Software (I'm using MAX) or in post (AfterFX, etc.)?

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do it in post (much more flexibility and better quality - faster) with a good zdepth with full black - white range (16bit or 32 bit much better than 8bit for this kind of thing)

 

alex roman says he uses after fx so i assume he uses it in conjunction with a plug in like lenscare and animates the focus point (or whatever it is in lenscare)

 

he also makes use of bokeh (the pretty bright shifting shapes when things are out of focus) which adds ALOT to the depth and feel of things. you can control this in post quickly as well.

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Not being too familiar with how exactly ZDepth works I wonder if you could give me a quick description of how that would work.

 

My sans ZDepth approach that I'm thinking of trying was to seperate the elements (foreground and background elements) in post via object ID, put them on seperate layers and then use Gausian blur with keyframes to make it fade in and out. I'll let you know how it works out.

 

I would still like to know more about the ZDepth method though.

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A zdepth render is basically a black and white image with things being closest being white, and things further away being black, with a gradation in between. (or inverted, doesnt really matter)

 

you want to have your 'range' set to be at the furthest object in your scene from the camera.

 

do you use vray? its a standard vray render element, just tick it to enable it and set your distance as mentioned above.

 

Otherwise you can apply a Falloff map in the diffuse, then apply that material to your whole scene (or in global mat override) and set it to 'distance blend' mode, making sure to put in the range.

 

Use this zdepth as the input/depth map in afterfx lens blur /lenscare (not sure of specifics as i dont use afterfx)

 

best do a quick test with some boxes and teapots to try it out.

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Most 3d Apps can output a zDepth image, which is basically a render of the scene where objects are colored from black to white depending on their distance to the camera (AKA zDepth). Thus objects closer to the camera appear white, while those far away appear black. This can be imported into any image editing software and use as a basis for manipulation. For instance you could load it as a selection in PhotoShop and use Gaussian Blur with that selection. Since different parts of the image will be more or less selected depending on their distance to the camera you basically get a "Blur by distance" effect.

 

It's basically the same idea behind what you were thinking...but better. The newer PhotoShops have a Lens Blur filter that let you load a Depth Map (another name for the zDepth image) and use that for blurring.

 

EDIT: seems I got here a second too late...o well...great minds think alike....

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