Need Best DOF solution for '08 (?)

#1

hey all,

What’s the general consensus on the best quality Depth of Field in LW. I haven’t used LW in awhile and wondering if any new 9.5 solutions trump XDOF or any other plugin that’s out there. Looking for very realistic camera lens effects.

Any input is greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

D

#2

for the best DOF solution always render a depth map and do it in post…

#3

What he said ^

The new DOF in Lightwave is nice but always best to do it in post

#4

Thanks for the replies. Although I can’t use a 2D comp solution at the moment (budget) I’m looking for a “in Lightwave” 3D solution. So I’m looking for a plugin for LW or best usage of new features. and I really need complex DOF look not just a bg blur.

Thanks,

D

#5

what version of lw are you using? if it’s new enough to have the orthographic camera type, you’re golden: just create a plane, load it into a fresh scene, load your previously rendered images, texture the plane with’em. using nodes it’s quite easy to composite and manipulate images.

#6

I would create the depth pass with Fog for better control then what the depth Pass gives you.

ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/Depth.mov

#7

Imho… the very best quality DOF is the one you can achive when rendering. Though, in many cases you’ll need a good deal of AA (especially on a stillframe) to get rid of all the noise. If you can take the renderhit, I vote for using any of the new cameras in conjunction with the new AA to get a really good looking dof. You can also take advantage of LWs interactive mblur/dof preview to get a really fast preview of what the DOF will look like.

AA-settings that will generate a pretty noisefree dof is:

AA: 5
AS: 0.01
Oversample: 0.1

Composited dof is way, way faster, but you really can’t get that crisp image if you aim for very low F-stop value. Also, transparent objects needs some planning if going for composite dof.

When LW9.2 was about to go into open beta, NewTek posted a sneak peak video from a LA usergroup meeting. In that video there was a sequence that showed an animated dof effect where the subject was a transparent glasscube with refractions and caustics. The animated dof-effect looked absoutely stunning and that particular example is a great example where a composited approach would be almost impossible. If I ever find that video I’ll get back here and post a link!

EDIT: Oh and yes… if you can take the renderhit, the new DOF is certanly on the same level as XDOF, but without any of the drawbacks a pixefilter/imagefilter plugin may suffer from.

#8

The LW9.2 sneak peak video I talked about earlier…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKfV7b2qTAs

32 seconds into the clip. As I said, VERY tricky stuff to do in comp regarding DOF and refraction/transparency combination.

#9

I used to do that ( and still do sometimes) but I was told of a reason not to use that technique. When rendering with fog and using AA to smooth the edges the AA is smoothing between depth values which would actually alter those values where you’d often notice them most.

Personally, I notice the jagged edges of regular depth passes more but it did make me think.

#10

When using a depth pass, what do you do if you have foreground objects that are out of focus as well? do you have to render them out separately?

Also, I use the fog technique as well, the AS may cause it to have some inaccuracies (seems negligible to me…) but its a lot more accurate than the jaggie filled images that come from the buffers!

#11

Actually, using the Z-buffer export with exrTrader allows you use Depth Blur in Fusion, which gives you some more controlls, such as changing the focal point, f-stop and level of dof.

EDIT: The thing with Depth Blur is that it is dependent on a Z-buffer channel. You can use it with a fog-pass as well, but you will not get the same level of control as with the z-buffer.

EDIT2: I did a video showing this technique… http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=5605810&postcount=2

#12

Nice video, but for me it doesn’t help a great deal since I use After Effects for compositing. Cant afford Fusion…
I get some pretty annoying “line crawling” when I apply a blur using the depth map with either the 200% trick using the depth buffer, or using the fog trick and AA. I actually get a much more useable end result by combining the two and rendering a fog pass with AA at 200%.

Still can’t get DOF as clean as it is when rendered straight out of LW though (without the crawling lines)…what am I missing here?

#13

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