best depth of field plugin?

[biliousfrog]

Frischluft's DOF plugin is great. I expect that you're using a straight, aliased depth buffer which is why the results are pixelated. Depth buffers are usually aliased although some renderer's allow the option of anti-aliasing them. If the depth pass is aliased and the colour pass is anti-aliased the edges won't line up correctly which will cause horrible glitches.

Some people render the depth buffer at 200% and then scale it down to smooth it out. Personally, I prefer to manually create them by using matte objects and depth fog, that way you can have the exact same AA settings for the colour passes and the depth pass.

Can you post a pic of the issue you're having.

[nevermetagerman]

thats all great advice, much appreciated B. my z-depth is AA. i render in passes in XSI but only are the tiny areas where its a little bit blurred do i see it. so i'm just going to ignore it i guess since its almost unnoticable unless you really looked. thanks again though

[noxy]

I used to think that an antialiased depth buffer was a good thing too.
That is, until I realized that the edge pixels, when antialiased, actually moved the edge through space since they altered the luminance. Now, I always use the aliased edge, straight out of a zpass (processed in Shake), and never have a problem, even with closeups and extreme dof at 2k.
Of course, I'm using Frischluft, so can't claim to know how other filters deal with this.
Antialiased depth buffers are better for distance fog and mattes though.


Noxy

[nevermetagerman]

thanks noxy, ill try a test of that next time.

[biliousfrog]

I used to think that an antialiased depth buffer was a good thing too.
That is, until I realized that the edge pixels, when antialiased, actually moved the edge through space since they altered the luminance. Now, I always use the aliased edge, straight out of a zpass (processed in Shake), and never have a problem, even with closeups and extreme dof at 2k.
Of course, I'm using Frischluft, so can't claim to know how other filters deal with this.
Antialiased depth buffers are better for distance fog and mattes though.


Noxy

That's an interesting point, thanks Noxy. So do you use it at 1:1 or render at double and scale down?

[noxy]

So far I have done everything at 1:1, and I have used it quite a lot with no problems. I wish I didn't need to use Shake to extract and adjust the zpass though, but it's something I'm willing to deal with.

Frischluft is my favorite filter for doing exactly what you want with the controls for dialing things in. I would also like to test it more with floating point files, since I love the bokeh effect you can get with blown out highlights.

Noxy

[Navstar]

How is LensCare better than AE's own Lens Blur?

[noxy]

this is an old image that does the explanation

http://www.frischluft.com/lenscare/quality_comparison.html

I would say that it does a similar effect, but with massively more control and detail.
You can pick where you want the focal point to be and easily choose the falloff and effects of the blur.

I haven't come up with a situation where it has performed differently than what I expected, and that's worth a lot to me.

[CarlRiver]

this is an old image that does the explanation

http://www.frischluft.com/lenscare/quality_comparison.html

I would say that it does a similar effect, but with massively more control and detail.
You can pick where you want the focal point to be and easily choose the falloff and effects of the blur.

I haven't come up with a situation where it has performed differently than what I expected, and that's worth a lot to me.
Looks like the AE lens blur works similar to the built-in DOF of Combustion. All it does is duplicate the layer, blur it and mix the blurred and unblurred version together through the zDepth image. Thus the horrible result with glowing edges.
I recently tried out Richard Rosenman's Depth of Field Generator. It is a plugin for Photoshop but works on image sequences as well and produces phenomenal results. And it has even more features like optimizing anti-aliased zBuffers, using custom bokeh-maps and so on.

[Navstar]

No way... those comparisons are not using CS3 AE Lens Blur. That example is using a square fast blur algorithm that looks like crap. CS3 Lens Blur looks much much better (you can define the shape of the iris as you can in frischluft).

[noxy]

I tried using a similar scene with both Frischluft and CS3 lens blur, although lens blur has definitely improved, it is nowhere near as usable as Frischluft.
The focal picker alone is worth the price of admission.
Also, the detail in the out of focus areas looks far better with Frischluft.

For example, here is a scene with similar blur settings.

The first is with cs3 lens blur, the second with Frischluft dof

[nevermetagerman]

yeah, i never got why photoshop's lens blur never blurred outside the edges. makes no sense.

[Navstar]

Thanks for posting that. That's a far more realistic comparison. I see the different in the fine details and edge areas.

I'll need to buy that plug for my next project.

[Kev3D]

Has anyone tried applying the lens blur to the depth pass and using the result to lens blur the final image and comparing the result to Frishluft's plugin?

[blacknoise]

i can confirm that Frischluft lenscare is the best (imho) you can do most of the shots with this plugin. here are some extreme particle tests:
http://community.softimage.com/showthread.php?t=3946
XSI with Lenscare

[Gaso]

I recently tried out Richard Rosenman's Depth of Field Generator. It is a plugin for Photoshop but works on image sequences as well and produces phenomenal results. And it has even more features like optimizing anti-aliased zBuffers, using custom bokeh-maps and so on.

I have also tried DoF Generator (known as DOF PRO these days) and I have to agree, it has a nice feature set. Spherical abberation, chromatic abberation, photometric burnout, custom bokeh maps...

On the other hand it's also the slowest, and not really suitable for video work unless you have a lot of time to spare or really high end hardware.

Here's a bokeh test I did. This single image took over five minutes to calculate with a Q6600 using all four cores. The dragonfly is a separate layer, as transparency is not supported.

Original (http://gaso.1g.fi/temp/dragonfly_nodof.jpg)
Processed (http://gaso.1g.fi/temp/dragonfly_dof.jpg)

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