Depth Of Field Strength ..

[eternal art]

Is There Anyway to Increase the Strength Of The Depth Of Field in Fx Tree ...

http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/8523/depthstrengthek7.jpg

when i'm tried to put value more than 1 .. nothing change .. any idea .
thanks is advanced ..

[luceric]

Check the doc on this one. The parameter you're probably after is the "Max Circle Of Confusion". I think the streight is just a way to scale it.

[Milosh]

I have problems with this node too. It's really poor for me. Now i make faked DOF pass based on distant gradient and render DOF in photoshop with plugin DOFpro, it's not good solution too. Slow (one core) and not easy to setup like node in fxtree, but you have total control on dof strenght and result is much better.

[luceric]

The DOF node in the FxTree is a version of the older DOF 2D Output Shader.

It requires rendering a .ZPic, otherwise it will apear to not work with a Depth Map and the parameter values won't apear to make sense. You'd need to change ZValueRange in that case.

When you move your mouse over the picture, while editing the DOF node (E), you should be seeing the Z Depth values, right next to RGB/A/XY at the bottom of the Fx Viewer. That's tremendously helpful to set the Near and Far Focus. The Near focus plane must me smaller than Far focus :)

Near and Far focus are in Softimage (i.e. Scene) units, in distance to camera.

Everything will be blurred from the camera to near focus, and then from far focus to infinit. The size of blur varies depending on the Z, from zero up to Max Circle Of Confusion (if I'm not mistaken)

[eternal art]

thanks luceric ... i was read the doc .
but it's seems in my situation changing the Max Circle parameter doesn't affect anything ?
when i comp the same passes in After effect with (Lenscare plugin). it's working very will and let me increase the blur for the out of focus area as mush as i want .

i tried many solution in fxtree to got the same effect with no luck :
-changing all the parameter - color correct the depth to more contrast color - rendering an sgi 16 bit and many other test ...

- maybe i miss something .. If attaching the scene will help .. let me know and i will do ..

many thanks .

[luceric]

Not sure what's wrong, but if you're not using actual .Zpic files, and you're changing "Z Value Range", then it's less clear what becomes the meaning of the other parameters, and it become more difficult to use. It's just though out to use Zpic.

Z Value Range is used this way:
actual Depth in softimage units = (1 - (value of the ZPic))* Z_Value_Range

So if Z Value Range is 100 (as it is in the first post),
1.0 (white pixels) in the Z image = 0 (very near)
0.0 (black pixels) in the Z image = 100 (very far)

The Near, Far focus values are no longer in Softimage units if this value is not the default, 100,000.0. Normally, you should not touch Z Value Range if you use Zpic already.

Since your thumbnail for the depth pass apears gray, and not orange, I suspose that you are not using .Zpic.

One thing you should watch out for: does that depth image have an Alpha channel? If it's RGBA and connected to a grayscale input like the Depth Of Field, the FxTree will choose the Alpha, rather than using the RGB. If that's the problem, go in the FileInput node and change the Type to RGB instead of RGBA.

[Milosh]

I think eternal art want more blur than DOF in fx tree can give. This is no possible to do in fx tree. Fx tree DOF node is very limited and not giving much control, nothing like real bokeh, no aperture blade control.

[wurp]

can you not just tighten the range between the near and far value, that should give you more DOF..

I agree with the fact that this node could use a rewrite, it would be nice to have a DOF node in xsi that can do proper dof, i find that the current node doesnt really work when you have an alpha, which you usually have. I've had great success using this on full cg images where the alpha is completely solid but on for example a character that has been rendered separately, it screws up the edges. I'm usually forced to go over to AFX to do dof using the lenscare plugin.

How much work is it to support afx plugins in the fxtree? Because they are compiled for windows i guess they wont run under the linux version, but even if it was limited to the windows platform it would be a big step forward.


edit: when adding the .zpic render channel you need to make sure that the output images are named exactly the same, except for the extension. so if your beautypass is called "my_render_beauty.pic" your .zpic must be named "my_render_beauty.zpic" by default xsi includes the name of the channel in the filename and since they are different channels that setup wont work with .zpic, note that the format of the main pass must be pic, this is due to the fact that .zpic reads some information from the .pic file.

and as for setting the filein node to rgb rather than rgba like luceric suggested is not a good way to do things in my opinion, if you for example do a search&replace on all your file-in nodes the settings will pop back to its default settings i.e rgba, so it's better to use for example a pixel-parser and type in "r" in there to put the red channel into all the channels of the output.