Raytraced DOF needs a lot, a lot of anti alias to avoid the noise. If you use Infinite, use the hybrid dof instaed, with 3 or 4 passes. It is less accurate, but renders a bit faster, and it's noise free.

Quote - Raytraced DOF needs a lot, a lot of anti alias to avoid the noise. If you use Infinite, use the hybrid dof instaed, with 3 or 4 passes. It is less accurate, but renders a bit faster, and it's noise free.

Bruno021, I use Vue 6 Infinite. Yes It sure must need a lot. I will try the hybrid, but how much antialias would I need to use if I want to go the ray trace route? and would I just increase the "Advanced Effects Quality" from 59% to ? I was hoping Vue 6 would have improved the DOF quality. Thanks

I never set the advanced effects quality above 46%, ever.
Last time I used raytraced dof I used min 12, max 48, 75% quality for the AA settings.

I want the noise to be completely gone, so as soon as I get the time I will do a batch of test renders with many different settings to see which settings work best. If anyone beats me to it please show your results. Thanks

In these situations, with user settings, one of the most important settings is the Min number of rays.

Raising it will increase the quality of the blur, but it will also hit you with high render time depending  on your image.

In practice, for complex scenes, I found it is usually eaier to use postwork to achieve depth of field, with a photoshop plugin or otherwise.

Agiel, Yeah I am finding this Vue DOF real frustrating. I would have hoped EON would have made something useful, but this DOF is useless IMO. I guess I will resort to a plug-in although it wil not be true DOF. Thanks!

Attached Link: http://www.dofpro.com/dofprovscgdof.htm

Attached Link: http://market.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2244858

agiel - Thanks for the link to the plugin, this looks really good, just downloaded it now. On my latest image I manually added blur inside PSP for the DOF effect because I thought doing it inside Vue would take forever without guaranteed results as I have yet to learn this process in Vue.. It's looks OK, but I really need to experiment with this concept more.

Agiel, Thank for the link. I actually Googled DOF last night and found DOF Pro but unfortunately they don't seem to have a mac version. I think Vue can create an Alpha/Depth Map. Wouldn't using this and blur in Photoshop produce similar results?

Yes, almost the same result. Load your depth map in the alpha channel of your render and use the dof filter.

What do you mean by 'use the dof filter'?

In Photoshop CS2, you have a dof filter, now my PS is in french, so I don't know how it's called in english, but it's the 3rd filter in the blur filters category.

I am just trying to figure out how to use my Z render as a gradient mask for the blur really.

My PS does not have a blur called dof blur, my third one down is called 'blur more'.

I have seen how the gradient mask works, I just have not figured it out myself is all.

If you don't have a DOF filter, here is how you can use your gradient :

1- Open your image and gradient side by side

2- Edit the gradient to make sure the range goes from black to white (using Adjustment -> Curves works best)

3- Copy your gradient

4- Set your color image to Mask mode

5- Paste your gradient into the color image. That will mask your image according to the gradient

6- Switch back to normal mode. Your mask / gradient will be transformed into a Selection

7- Go to Gaussian Blur and you should be all set

Attached Link: http://www.keindesign.de/stefan/poser/dof_tutorial.html

The main difference with a full DOF plugin is that you will end up having some minor deffects along transitions between shades of grey in your gradient.

A way to reduce that is to apply a gaussian blue to the gradient image itself before copy / pasting it into your mask .

As with many things, a lot of practice is necessary to get it right.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=756299

I can't seem to get the blur to be masked properly, on the actual render layer, after I get this far.

This looks like the mask after you paste your gradient into your image in Mask mode.

From here, you just have to switch back to regular mode and apply the blur filter to the selection.

nm, I think I figured out what I was doing wrong.

Thank you for the steps.

I just did not have enough contrast in the mask.

Quote - I never set the advanced effects quality above 46%, ever.
Last time I used raytraced dof I used min 12, max 48, 75% quality for the AA settings.

Not to take away anything that Agiel has said, as his approach is great too, but read this post again. 

ALL DOF I have done uses these type of settings, and though the render will take longer, it gets rid of the crappy edges.

When you render, the depth map is rendered automatically.

Look at the icons just above the frame of your render window. One has a Z written on it - it's your Z map, or depth map.

Click on it, you will see the gradient and you only have to save it the same way as you save regular images.

Hint- Do not save as jpeg as the compression can introduce black spots in your gradient. Always save as jpg.

Save as psd is my recommendation.

You are going to be using that format already, might as well make it native.

And if you don't, then use tif for your original save.  It is a compressionless and lossless file format.(most of you probably already know that, though).