Quote - 10 samples is pretty high. You can get good results at 6 or so. If you have to leave Backface culling unchecked you will need to crank the samples to about 12. There is a bug filed on the Backface culling messing with DoF hopefully that will get fixed in the next release.

Aha! I would never have thought to check that. Backface culling never seemed to produce much, if any render time benefit and caused problems for me often enough that I just completely ignored the option shortly after it was introduced. I'll have to test that out with a few scenes. Thanks, nerd!

Quote - You don't need the python script to calculate the focal distance. When you adjust the focus on the camera a DoF gizmo will appear in the scene. It indicates the focal point with a big cross hair in the posing window.

Yeah, I know about the focus distance control, but in p6 it was rather unresponsive, so the script saved quite a bit of hair pulling, using it just became a habit. But now I see that the control in p7 works very well.

Quote - The chunky background : sorry. I get the same thing but it's better than P6 could do. You might throw a little gaussian blur in that in PS or PSP.

Heh, since I'm going to have to postwork the hair shadows anyway, I might as well bust out with some bluring and softening tools.

One thing I noticed is that the 'chunkiness' seems more pronounced on backgrounds with more straight lines and right angles, but less so in more natural scenes. Or is it just my random luck?

I'm just grateful to the poser dev team for improving it to the point that I can actually DO some of these things! If I tried to do that scene I posted above in p6, it would have choked out a laugh at me right before it died.