rokket opened this issue on Apr 30, 2011 · 260 posts
bagginsbill posted Wed, 04 May 2011 at 10:08 AM
Poser DOF is done (I think - not sure) by rendering the image from multiple camera positions and then blending (averaging) them together. So if you want really good DOF, you use a lot of samples. For example, if you set Pixel Samples = 16, then each rendered pixel is the combination of a 16x16 rectangle of sub-pixel samples - that's 256 - each of which was created by moving the camera a little bit and re-evaluating the render. So that's 256 renders in 1. Compare that to the usual 3x3 sub-pixel samples, good enough for a little anti-aliasing, which is only 9 renders in 1. Doing 256 samples for each pixel takes a long time.
As an example of extreme DoF in Poser, here is "Balls2". This was done with 16x16 pixel samples. It took about 3.5 hours on my 8-thread I7 system.
I widened the aperture so that the DoF would be very shallow.
How do you rate the bokeh? I think it is bad, and until Poser changes the DoF technique, I would not go this far trying to feature the bokeh.
Observe the shape of the sun's specular highlight - the little hot spot on the balls. In the blurred versions, it is a square! No real camera has a square aperture, so this is a bit of a fail for photorealism.
Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)