Depth of Field

What is Depth of Field (DOF)? In my opinion, camera only focuses within a specific range. See this picture. Between these three balls, camera focus in most left ball and other ball seen blurry.
How to create this effect in Autodesk Maya?

Depth of Field

Create object like picture bellow.

Select camera1 and check Depth of field. Like my opinion about DOF, this effect depent on range between camera and object. How I know range between camera and object?

To know the range between camera and object, you must activates object details (see picture below).

After object details active, you will see this text on scene.

Now you must select the camera (this is important!!!).

After you select the camera, now select the object. You will see the distance on scene (in my scene distance between camera 1 and ball 1 is 4.3).
Distance between camera 1 and ball 2 is 12.3.
Distance between camera 1 and ball 3 is 18.3.

I want focus on ball 1, so I must set Focus Distance 4.3 and for F Stop I always do trail and error in this case I set F Stop to 7.


Focus Distance 4.3, F Stop 7.


Focus Distance 12.3, F Stop 4.


Focus Distance 18.3, F Stop 4.

Did you enjoy this tutorial or article? If so, then subscribe to my feed by email:

9 Comments »

Comment by ShengDaFlashPro
2008-11-25 17:28:21

aren’t there ways (expect PS or crap like that) to make the blur more ‘high quality’? now it just looks like a lump of crap… :(

- SDFP :)

 
Comment by NrKs
2009-02-15 17:50:29

Thank You :)

 
Comment by danny
2009-02-27 21:38:31

hi,
i was just wondering,
is there a way to animate with depth of field?

say you want to zoom in, loose focus, but then after zoomed in:
it gets back its focus.

thx

Comment by Odon
2009-03-01 04:33:57

@danny
for animate dof usually I combine between camera position, Focus Distance and F Stop.
for example(I use this tutorial and in my opinion you already understand about key framing):
1. my target is ball 3 and animate in 24 frame.
2. frame 1: set key camera position, Focus Distance and F Stop (i use condition focus on ball 1).
3. frame 24: move camera forward to ball 3 (zooming) and set key camera position, change focus distance and f stop until focus on ball 3.
That’s it. I hope this can solve your problem.

 
 
Comment by danny
2009-03-02 18:51:34

thanks alot,
my only problem is that i can’t seem to set a keyframe for focus distance or F stop. ( i press ‘S’ for set key, but i doesnt set a key for focus distance or f stop ). i think im doing something wrong here

Comment by Odon
2009-03-04 08:43:54

@danny
if you want to set keyframe on f stop, right click on top of it and keyframe it not use ‘S’.

 
 
Comment by danny
2009-03-05 17:42:49

thx a million this really helped me out

 
Comment by studiocg3d
2009-03-31 19:21:24

some tuto’s charge 70$ For this thanx for the tip

 
Comment by Jrajason
2009-04-30 22:39:28

You could render them out individually in an animation and drop them in After Effects as layers. Put a Gaussian Blur, motion blur, what have you, individually, and adjust them. Pull them forward, backward, side to side, adjust motion blur. The render time is half in most situations and you have full Control in Post.

 
Name (required)
E-mail (required - never shown publicly)
URI

Your Comment (smaller size | larger size)
You may use <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> in your comment.

Trackback responses to this post