When I set the Bryce options in Render Settings to use DOF, set to a selected object, I'm finding that the out of focus areas are very grainy as opposed to just being blurred. It doesn't look good. Has anyone else found this, or maybe found a way to avoid it?

 I've never been that bold but I'd suspect the higher the AA the lower the Grainy...just what I suspect.. ...

Yep, Bobby is right. If you want the kind of results I'm guessing you want, you'll need to use premium rendering with at least 64 rays.per pixel. The same is true for soft shadows. Takes longer to render but I think the difference is worth it, HTH.
John

Thanks guys:) The setting I tried however was using premium rendering with 64 rays. You don't get the option for DOF on the settings other than Premium.

Hi, I usually set the lens radius to 0.02 which is as low as it gets.Makes it  less fuzzy,don't know if reducing the radius will help for graininess!

 Cheers! Jed.

I used DOF all the time and never had any problems.

Hey dhama, how about sharing your settings with us? :wub: :tt1:

To answer your question, I did once but the render was too long so I just do the DOF mask and cheat with Photoshop's Lens Blur filter...

 The DOF needs a high amount of rays for grain to get less.
For most people 64 rays reduces grain to acceptable levels, but if you really want someting supersmooth you'll have to go with even higher settings.
However, if you have photoshop, i'd definitely go for the lens blur filter like ThunderStone said, it just requires so much less rendering time to render without DOF.

Yup, an acceptable (non-grainy) DOF inside of Bryce takes far, far too long to render, imo. I always create a distance render to use with Photoshop (or you could use Gimp) to apply the DOF in post-work. This also gives me the option of how strong I want the effect (blurring) without having to re-render.

Bryce users shouldn't feel bad though, most high-end 3D users (maya, etc) do the same thing. It just saves on time and gives you more flexibility.

AS

 Yeah AS...all falls into the multi pass technique ubiquitious in the imdustry...and really makes sense time wise if you are doing a fussy project that needs lotsa tweaking.. ...

No.

:b_funny:
Thanks!!!

Thanks everyone for your input. I had to go with achieving the effect in Photoshop in the end, Bryce just wasn't cutting the mustard on this occasion:(. Here is my attempt:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1949184

Ok, now I see why it took a long time to render, but even though you've gone the ADOBE Photoshop software, it's turned out very well.

It actually didn't take a long time at all. It was really quite quick because I used only Bryce objects and materials, and the scene wasn't object intensive.  I'm not very patient in waiting for images to render:)

I meant with DOF, because of the 'glass' mats.

Good work, keep it up. Using DOF blurring is a bit of an art in itself!