In real life, it is rare that all objects around us are in focus all the time. To add a sense of realism to a scene, you can add some depth of field, which is an effect that simulates a plane of maximum sharpness and blurs objects in front of, close to, or beyond this plane. Depth of field settings work the same way as on a physical camera.
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Far Depth of Field With a far depth of field setting, only objects farther from the camera are in focus. |
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Near Depth of Field With a near depth of field, only objects close to the camera are in focus. |
You can create a depth of field effect by applying any of the depth of field shaders available from the shader library within Softimage. You can choose one of the following methods:
You can use a lens shader such as the Depth of Field shader that takes multiple samples using different paths to reach the same point on the focus plane to interpolate the depth effect. Lens shaders are applied to the camera's shader stack, see Applying Lens Shaders to Cameras.
You can use an output shader that collects depth information during rendering and then applies a blurring filter as a post-processing step over the finished image. Output shaders are applied at the pass level, see Applying Shaders to Passes [Rendering].
