Depth of Field - A Blender Tutorial

An easy way to add astonishing realism to an otherwise unrealistic render!

Thanks to Axisistilter345 for the inspiration. This is an easier technique, but check out his method, too, as well as his awesome simulations.

Music:
"Motorcycle Driver" by Joe Satriani.
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DOF fakes the tendency of lenses to blur objects that are out of focus, and can be animated to focus the eye of the viewer on objects of importance.
In order to see the effect, model a scene in which something in the foreground can be focused upon and something in the background can be blurry.
In this case, an egg on a marble stand, with a gorgeous guy photographed in the background.
You know you want me. =]
The first thing we do is open the nodes editor of Blender. We'll do this by splitting our 3D view.
Click on the 3D View tab and select the Node Editor icon.
Click the "Composite Nodes" button, which looks like a tiny portrait.
Now we'll add the Defocus filter, by pressing space bar.
Add - Filter - Defocus
It is very important to connect the nodes correctly. For this filter, connect "Image" and "Z" from Render Layers to Defocus. Then connect "Image" from Defocus to Composite.
On the Defocus node, enable Gamma Correct and disable No zbuffer.
"fStop:" is the heart and soul of this effect. It controls the amount of blur caused by the Defocus effect. The default is 128, which is no blur. But if we turn it down, the blur increases.
Enable the "Do Composite" button in the Scene tab and render the current frame.
You can see the blur now, but it is uniform across the render.
To focus our camera on the foreground, we select the camera and open the Editing tab.
Select "Limits" to view the focal point of our camera, which is illustrated by the yellow cross.
Increase the "DofDist" value and you'll notice the focal point moves down the line towards our egg. Now our camera is focused.
Voila! A beautiful and easy DOF effect. The stand is in focus, while the photos are unfortunately not.
Play around with the fStop: value to find the focus sweet spot.
This is obviously too much blur. Let's scale it back a bit.
The effect can be subtle, but Depth of Field adds amazing realism with incredible ease.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• josh
• vickers
• axisistilter
• anyoneseenmyhead
• slyjoe
• depth
• of
• field
• dof
• blender
• 3d
• tutorial
• animation
• joe
• satriani

[Willem3141]

First tried to figure it out myself but missed the fStop option... Now it is working because of this tutorial, thanks!

[anyoneseenmyhead]

@Willem3141 I'm glad this tutorial is still helping people out. Good luck!

[anyoneseenmyhead]

@macgeek1972 Absolutely. One thing it took me a while to realize I'd that the cursor in Blender is sensitive to the window over which it is hovering. So if you hover your mouse over the Focal Distance window and press I to make an Ipo, the context-sensitive window that appears will display an ipo for focal distance. To see the graph, change the ipo editor from Object mode to Camera mode.

[SEspider]

Thank you SO MUCH, Josh!

In the years I've been playing with Blender, I've never had a reason to use DP. And now a projuct is coming up that requires it. You're a life saver!

[anyoneseenmyhead]

@SEspider I'm truly glad that it helped, SEspider. :)

[SEspider]

@anyoneseenmyhead

Small issue. I just tried it (2.5) and all I ever get is a Black render. I can't seem to find the Composite button anywhere in the newer version of blender. can you help? Thanks in advance

[anyoneseenmyhead]

@SEspider It looks like I'm still using 2.49. I'll have to download 2.5 and see what I can find for you.

I will say this, though. I downloaded 2.5 beta a while ago and was totally thrown by a new GUI. I don't know if this is why you are having this issue. But for me, it was difficult to navigate after being accustomed to the previous GUI. (And they might have changed it back since then?)

[macgeek1972]

Thanks alot, great tut! Any chance you could tell me how to animate the dof distance, say to do a rack focus?

[anyoneseenmyhead]

@ajkfrty7 I'm afraid I haven't delved much into the Game Blender engine. But I can bet that there will always be some sort of view limit, at least based on your video card. You might try scaling down your models.

[anyoneseenmyhead]

@geek113377 Be sure that a) You are in "Composite Nodes" (you do this by clicking the little face icon) and b) You have the "Use Nodes" button clicked.