Create Depth Of Field

Hello and welcome to this tutorial about Depth Of Field! What we have here is a simple scene with dices. And if we render it we can see that all the objects in the scene are rendered perfectly sharp. Well, even though you can see this is an computer generated image, we can add some realism by creating Depth Of Field in this picture.

Render settings and camera settings

In order to do that, go to the render settings by hitting Command B or this icon. Change the standard render settings to the psycical render settings, add Depth Of Field, go to the camera, to the physical tab and there you have the Aperture or F-Stop. The lower this value, the shallower the depth of field will be. I will change it to 1 and turn on the movie camera function.

Focus distance

Now deselect the camera and move this point towards the object or area that you want to be sharp in the image. I want this green dice to be sharp. Turn on the camera again and as you see the green dice in front is sharp and everything around it becomes blurry.

Focus on Object

We can also align the depth of field to an object. In order to do that, go to the object tab of the camera, go to Focus Object and drag an object into the field. In this case I will drag the orange dice into it. Lets render and voila. The orange dice is sharp. This function comes in handy when you have a moving object that you want to be in focus all the time.

Quality of the blur

If you want to increase the quality of the blurred areas in the image, go to the render settings/physical and set the sampling quality to ‘high‘. This will also increase the rendertime a lot. So if you want to make your computer cry. Set this to high quality.

So play around with the Aparture and I hope you learned something! My name is Ferdy Korpershoek and I will see you next time.