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HiveWire 'Depth of Field' Render Challenge: CLOSED

HadCancer

Motivated
As the rules for the challenge state, you can do the DoF with postwork in your 2D graphics application of choice. A lot of folks like to do the background of the scene separately, and then blur it in Photoshop, PSP, Gimp or the like, before compositing it with the foreground of the scene, which was rendered in Poser or DS.

IOW, you don't have to do the DoF in Poser.
Popping in again...smile. Never learned Photoshop either, but with my last few doctors test results coming in as normal instead of Abby Normal ( Young Frankenstein reference) I figure I should learn how to do more than put my name on renders, since I may hang around a little longer, and since I won a copy of Filter Forge in a contest at another site and I see it attached itself as a Plugin on my cheapo Photoshop Program.
 

quietrob

Extraordinary
Looking at my dof images in post #13 and #15 I noticed that the Poser built-in DoF doesn't have the transparency (hair) problem that shows up if you use a Z Depth render and do the DoF in postwork. To get a depth-map for postwork that respects the transparency I think (and this is just a guess - I'll try it out later) that two additional renders would be required - one would be a transparency mask (a normal render with all the lights off and any distant background behind the transparency switched off) and the other would be a Z Depth render with the transparent object switched off.

Anyway, I was surprised that the Poser in-built DoF is not as slow as I recall it being. Maybe that's because I'm using PP2014, and the last time I tried it I was probably using Poser... 6 ? I'd noticed that the helicopter was very grainy (I usually go to Render Settings > Automatic, slide the slider to halfway between Draft and Final, switch to Manual and select 'Acquire From Auto'). I read something since this challenge started that said to increase 'Pixel Samples' and/or decrease 'Min Shading Rate' on the render settings to reduce the graininess, so I increased Pixel Samples from 6 to 12 and halved Min Shading Rate from 1.0 to 0.5.

Here's the latest - it's the version with Vicky, so not suitable for this challenge, but it's another step in the process of understanding DoF. :

View attachment 12407

Another small addition - I also used the Poser Atmosphere Depth Cue with bagginsbill's distance falloff correction (I should post that over in the Poser Shaders forum - I've added a placeholder thread that I'll update after posting this) and a large half-distance to provide a subtle atmospheric effect.

Just sending extra internet points for the posing. It darned dynamic and I wouldn't be surprised to see it in a pose set somewhere!
 
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