A quick question for all the early adopters of Poser 7 - how well does it handle Dept of Field rendering? How do the render times compare with Poser 6? I love using this feature, but fear I will melt my laptop when I invoke it...

FWIW I am running P6 on an HP Presario with an AMD64 chip (dunno which one but it's 18 months old for the geeks who can trace such ancestries) and 1 GIG of RAM

TIA
Martin

I don't know how it compares, but it's fast enough that I've actually been using it.  Never got very far with it before.  Firefly renders with smoothing and DOF still seem faster than firefly renders without in version 6.  Everything seems faster, but I'm also using a new system.  I was quite shocked to see Firefly rendering faster than the P4 renderer, though!

Depth of Field rendering is one of the few things that is immediately noticable as a change in Poser 7.

They have greatly improved the blur algorythm used to blend the pixels of blurred areas, giving a much smoother end look.

Poser 5/6 used a scramble technique, simply jumbling up the pixels.

Poser 7 on the other had, uses a uniform hatching pattern.

This is fantastic when coupled with high pixel samples because the sampling gets more closer results pixel to pixel, where as P5/6 was more of a hit and miss per pixel.

My latest gallery posting uses DOF in Poser 7, this was rendered with a pixel sample of only 5! you will immediately see (if your a P5/6 DOF user) the improvement.

as for speed, test rendering DOF is certainly quicker in P7. final renders though, I couldnt say as my scenes are usually quite intensive.

I have an AMD 2600xp (2ghz) processor and 1 gig of ram. so I think you'll be fine.

Then it's not just me!  I love the look of DOF in renders, but couldn't get good results with Poser6 with or without the unbearable render times.  The first pic I tried in P7 looked OK, thankfully it's also fast enough to experiment with different settings.  I was using only 3 or 4 samples, btw...

One tip about DOF. Turn ON Remove Backfacing Polys in your render options. With it turned off you may get spider web like artifacts in flat surfaces near the focal plane.

thats only applicable to scenes that dont have reflections, otherwise you can get some freaky reflections going on!

And here I was about to post a new thread with DoF questions. :D

Since DoF rendering is far faster in p7, I've decided to finally give it a real try. i was hoping someone could give me some tips to improve the blur quality.

As you can see in this image (warning, large file size. ~2MB), the blur is pretty good up until it reaches the back of the scene, whereupon it gets kinda chunky.

I used a DoF python script to get the focal distance to the character's head, and that comes into nice sharp focus, so it's pretty easy to do. Where I started getting confused was at the fstop setting, which the poser manual is typically vague about.  What are some guidelines as to what fstop value to use?

In the above image, I set samples to 10 and used an fstop of 10. Should i have set the samples higher (please say no, 3 hours is testing my patience :P) or lower, the fstop higher or lower?

I'm fairly new to the more advanced poser techniques, so any advice is welcome.

Higher F-stop numbers produce less blur and render faster.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Attached Link: My DoF Image

I was actually working on a Dof scene when I saw this thread yesterday so today I rendered it. I used the (?) default fstop setting of 2.800, 3 raytrace bounces, 5 pixel samples and .6 on shading rate. It took hours to render on my single processor machine, but it actually was faster than before version 7. I used a small app I got when Poser 5 came out and it figured out the settings easily. I don't get how to use that crosshair guide.

Thanks for the tips Nerd, I will take those into consideration next time I try it.

Select the camera you want to render with.  Find the focus distance parameter dial.  Adjusting it causes crosshairs to appear in viewport.  Centre of crosshair is approximate size of a typical figure's head.  Adjusting the focus causes the centre to move to/from the viewplane.  You should be able to visually judge where your focal point is as you calibrate.  It works very well for me (except for one time it seemed to detach from its camera).  Hope that helps...

It detaches from the camera alot in Poser 7 unfortunately. I use DOF in practically every render I do (final that is) adds that extra bit to the scene.

Playing with focus distance in poser 7 seems to cause other cameras to not work alot. seems to be random on when this happens, but it always happens to me whilst playing with focus. restarting fixes it.

I didn't know how to explain what was happening, it was almost as if I was seeing the DOF crosshair from a different camera than the one which I was actually using. (I think that probably is the cause of the glitch) I've only played with it for one session though, but that was enough to tell that it had been quite improved output-wise.

Just wanted to say that that was indeed the problem.  It's quite easy to select from the list, for example, the main camera while you are still using the face camera.  So, you can see the crosshairs from one camera as you use a different one, and yes, it looks pretty weird.  Is it just me or didn't selecting a camera from the list make that the active camera in previous versions?

I still find DOF in P7 to be slow and give poor results :(