Distance Blur?

[Volker Harun]

Regarding the distance-shader:

How do you set up the lighting?

At the moment I use the following setup, but still have artifacts due to the lighting:
GI: off
Environmental lighting: off
Heavy, but uniform overcasted sky
4 suns at 0°, 90°, ... at height of 45° strength each '1'; any shadow and glow turned off.

Regards,
Volker Harun

attached, an image with 3 Suns

[Oshyan]

Disable lighting entirely - it has no function in this case. Make sure all your objects have the Distance Shader connected as their Surface Shader input, along with the terrain. Turn off the atmosphere as well. That should give you the result you need.

- Oshyan

[sjefen]

I'm sorry to bring this topic back from the dead, but I just need a little help.

I have a scene where i want to have a depth of field effect. Do I first render it normal, then rerender it with the distance shader on all my shaders? And how do I use them together to get the depth of field effect? Do I need photoshop CS2 or better?

[3DGuy]

Render it like you said, 1 normal, 1 with the distance shader. Then open your images in photoshop. Copy the distance shader render to a new channel  (and call it depthfield). Go back to the normal RGB view/layer then from the filter menu choose blur, lens blur (I think it's present in CS2) and use the channel depthfield as a source. then you can play with the blur.

If you don't have the lens blur filter, hold the ctrl key and click on the depthfield channel. This will give you a selection. Then use gaussian blur to set the amount of blur you need.

[bigben]

...
for a depth pass, you could pull it off right now with a brute force workflow.  just texture your terrain jet black, texture your atmosphere jet white, and then set-up a white fog, which you can then control density and distance.  presto! instant depth pass.

An interesting approach, but how does the render time stack up against using the distance shader?

[Cyber-Angel]

I hope that in future that the camera in TG2 will support Depth of Field with a focus point just like real cameras have, it would be nice if the camera system in TG2 also supported different types of diaphragms, also pincushion and Barrel Distortion(Found in the telephoto range, but also in some models of fish eye lenses which we are told we will have in the future)  , vignetting would also be nice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vignetting  and if there is time Boken aberration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh.

In future could we have support for a thin film Optics System in TG2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin-film_optics in that way effects would be possible such as opalescence not currently possible with TG2 and as a photographer my self these things would be welcomed.

Control over aperture and Exposure would also be nice.

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel 
             

[bigben]

Have a play with Photoshop's Lens Blur filter. That will give you a reasonable amount of options.
Iris: 3 - 8 sided polygon
Variable blade curvature and rotation
Noise addition etc...

I had a quick play (again) following my earlier tests the last time this topic came up.  As suggested above, turned off all lighting, atmosphere and used a distance shader as the last shader for surfaces and on all objects. As the PS filter includes a distance selection, it's better to use a near distance of 0 (black) and a far distance of whatever you want the hyperfocal distance to be (500m in this case, white).

This seems to give a better result than masking near and far distances and using a standard blur filter.

[Cyber-Angel]

Bigben

What version of Photoshop do you have that has that filter I am kind of behind the times (Vary) since I have 5.5

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel

[Saurav]

The lens blur filter is present from version cs and up.

[sjefen]

Thank you for the answer 3DGuy but I'm really rusty in photoshop. If I add new channel it becomes totally black. I don't understand how I can copy my distance shader in there

[Volker Harun]

Sjefen,
you should deselect all other channels first by clicking on the eye-icon. Highlight the new channel and paste the b-w-mask in there.

[3DGuy]

In the image with the distance shader press CTRL+A then CTRL+C
Then in the new channel (which is black by default) press CTRL+V

[sjefen]

Thank you very much

[Anthony]

They probably haven't included it before because in landscapes there is almost no DOF blur. It is only apparent when you are looking at things relatively close...

[cyphyr]

BigBen ~ Your image looks like a scale model, I expect to see little plastic model solders in there, a very effective and interesting technique.
Richard