Is there a way to get a more intense DOF effect when rendering best quality with Depth Cue. I have my settings as high as they will go and the Depth1 and Depth 2 are set by dragging to points in the canvas. However the effect is so incredibly subtle. I’m trying to explain the controls in the render palette in a tutorial so I can’t cheat the effect in Photoshop.
Thanks,
Eric
Hello Eric,
I suggest you post a picture of what you are getting and where you want to go… DOF is like a color… full of shades.
I think you can start in ZB and add more in photophop ( I feel the effect is too subtle too ) … some like to add extra grain to it - this way it imitate better the film…
Happy ZB
Helios
I can’t use photoshop. This is a turorial in a book that explains the settings in the render panel so “use photoshop” is not really a satisfactory explanation of what depth cue does. I understand what it does its just that the results I’m getting are extremely subtle. I’m wondering I am missing a setting in another panel or if something else needs to be done in order to get a more intense blur in objects in the background. I’ve attached a comparison between the scene with the depth cue off (top), depth cue on (middle), and what I would expect to get done with a quick blur in photoshop (bottom). I have also attached a close up, you can see that it is working, the background cactus is blurred, but its very subtle. Finally I attached a screenshot of my settings. The background cactus is at .8281 so it should be well within the blurred area based on my settings. i even adjusted the edit curve so that the blurring would reach its maximum right after the foreground cactus. The depth cue sftness is at 7, ZBrush crashes when I put it at 8. Soft Z and SoftRGB don’t seem to fix the problem either.
Once again, I’m not trting to create a piece of artwork here, I’m trying to explain each of the settings in the render palette and how depth cue works in a ZBrush tutorial. i understand what the settings are supposed to do, I’m not understanding why I’m not getting what I would expect. I am rendering with best settings on.
Thanks
Depth Cue won’t go far enough for what you’re after. This is a case where you’d need to bake the layer after doing the best render, then use the Blur brush to soften the desired areas further.
That’s the answer I was looking for, just wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing something.
As Aurick said, baking is the key.
Enable Draw > MRGB and Draw > ZAdd and merge all visible document layers into 1 layer.
Now you can perform a best render (without Depth Cue)and bake the pixols at 100% with Layer > Bake. This results in a document with the best render result, the depth preserved and a flat color material applied to all pixols.
The flat color material ignores lighting and shadows during both preview and best renders. This is excellent as it means much faster processing of other best render features such as Depth Cue.
Enable Best Render and tweak your Depth Cue settings. Then increase Render > Antialiasing > Size and Super Sample, in that order (Super Sample is basically multiple renders in one go).
If you still do not get enough in/out of focus bake the document again.
Hope that helps.
The only side effect is how the border of the document contracts as you can see below. However that can be alleviated by using a script to expand the border. The effect shown below is also fairly extreme in that I Best Rendered and baked 4-5 times.