Tutorial: faking Depth of field in photos or movies with Blender
Here’s a nice trick that allows you to add depth of field to existing photographs.
Manuel wrote a small tutorial on an interesting technique to bring DOF to images afterwards by rebuilding the scene roughly in Blender and using the Z-Depth and Defocus node to more precisely blur the parts of the image which should be out of focus.He notes that this will get very interesting when also the internal camera tracker (Tomato branch) is merged into Blender
Link: http://manuell3d.wordpress.com/2011/10/01/fake-dof-blender-study/
There is another way I tested, that uses Cycles.
Instead of using the compositor, you can directly render the DOF effect. Plus, if you remember Mike Pan tutorial, you can modify the bokeh with a shape for added effect.
This tutorial is about modifying an existing photograph, so you wouldn’t be able to render it in cycles because you don’t have a scene.
1. Roughly reb-build the scene in Blender
2. Project from view
3. Use DoF (works in Cylces, too)
Thanks for posting this here :D
I really appreciate it.
Regards,
Manuel
I took one look at the image for this tutorial and then facepalmed. It’s so simple and elegant but i’d never have thought of it. Well done guy!
Rory
yep this is a pretty smart idea ;)
Projected transparent models would be an issue, but cycles could do the DOF. What you place behind would still need to be painted in though.
Clever. :)
Nice idea. Now think about using this in an animation with also using camera mapping for a nice parallax fx.
Technically speaking, you are not adding DOF, you are in fact artificially reducing/thinning the DOF – DOF being (zfar – znear), where zfar and znear are the distances to the furthest (resp. closest) planes which are considered to be in focus (based on a circle of confusion definition).