I'm trying to use Poser's Depth of Field function.  Is it ALWAYS really slow, or should I have NOT bumped the pixel samples to 4 and used Gaussian in my render settings?

A 700 x 700 pixel render, which normally takes less than 20 minutes to render using IDL in Poser Pro 2012 has been going for over 90 minutes now, yet looks to be only 10% done.

It has always been slow.

Laurie

And for exceptional Depth of Field, your pixel sampling should be 10 or higher.  Very slow.

Yes. I discovered this the hard way.  For preview renders, the DOF option looks great. But for quality renders at a high resolution, it's just too slow for me.  I'm still using depth maps and Photoshop lens blur filter.

Lovely!

It looks like this one will be many hours in the making . . .

Attached Link: This page excerpt from this tutorial. Compliments of Dr Geep Studios.

FYI - FWIW

Want to see the complete tutorial?

Click the "Attached Link:" (above the image)

Quote - Yes. I discovered this the hard way.  For preview renders, the DOF option looks great. But for quality renders at a high resolution, it's just too slow for me.  I'm still using depth maps and Photoshop lens blur filter.

I know I should probably RTFM... but I take it there's a reasonably straight forward way of making a depth map with Poser?

I think I read that there's a way of rendering into a layered photoshop PSD? Haven't tried this as yet... is creating a depth map part of this?

Many thanks ;-)

Just answered my own question I think, having just found this:

http://www.runtimedna.com/forum/showthread.php?64459-Creating-Depth-of-Field-For-3D-Renders-Using-Adobe-Photoshop

;-)

Quote - Just answered my own question I think, having just found this:

http://www.runtimedna.com/forum/showthread.php?64459-Creating-Depth-of-Field-For-3D-Renders-Using-Adobe-Photoshop

;-)

That's a great tutorial - thanks for the link!

I concur with hborre - DoF needs a high pixel sample rate for it to look good, especially with low fStop settings. That will increase render times though :-(

You might want to check the fStop setting on the camera. Not only will different values vary the strength of the DoF effect, but low fStop numbers render more slowly than high ones. The default is f2.8, but something like f4 can often give better results (this is subjective, of course, and depends on your artistic needs) and renders faster.

While I'm generally impressed with Poser's DoF, as a professional photographer I find the results not what I would expect from a camera. The results are perfectly usable though, once you get used to them.

If you do a lot of DoF renders and want maximum control, you might want to pay for a great Photoshop utility call DOF Pro:

http://www.dofpro.com/

Otherwise, Poser and Nightsong's tutorial get a great effect for free!

Just to illustrate the point, the attached link to my gallery is a render which ran over night.  It uses DoF at a pixel sampling of 10.  Excruciatingly slow but very little grainy effect, an artifact that you see with lower sampling.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1982426&user_id=343328&np&np

I bumped up the pixel sampling and let the render run last night. It's even WORSE than it was yesterday when I first complained about this!  Yikes!

To continue with examples .. :-)

My latest render uses DoF with pixel samples set to 12, but with an fStop of 4.0:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2321655

Total render time about 2 hours.

Two hours I might be able to deal with, but my current render is taking a LOT longer than that!  It was supposed to be a "just for fun" image, but this is not fun!

Evaluate other factors in your scene.  If you are using displacement maps throughout, that will increase render time.  If your app can support it use Normal maps or bump.  How many lights are present?  Those are memory hogs; also increase render time.  High resolution on polys?  Also a factor.

@ Snarly:  you should warn nudity on that link just in case someone is viewing from a work location.

I guess system spec must matter quite a lot here? Is everyone using fairly equivalent computers?

How much will the structure, size, complexity of a scene significantly impact the time that the DOF takes to process too? (EDIT: cross-posted there with hborre above)

I've literally just upgraded to a 3.4 Ghz quad core i7 imac... haven't tried a DOF render yet. I'm planning to...

But certainly any attempts to do it on my previous Core 2 Duo imac, beyond very basic scenes, I ended up just aborting after a significant number of hours.

My computer is a quad core i7 with 16 GB of RAM. I'm using two lights inside an environment sphere. (Normally, I will only use one light, but I wanted a back light in this scene.) As far as displacement maps are concerned, I hadn't given that a thought. I got up about two hours ago, checked on the render (my computer goes into "sleep" mode if left alone, so it didn't render all night long) and it had just started on the top row. After working for more than two hours now, it's still not done with its initial row. I can't remember a Poser render taking THIS much time!

I have to admit that my system is old and in need of an upgrade, although I have a 64bit system available but greatly under used.  In general, I believe scene content and complexity impacts on render time, and I try to evaluate every object for optimization and streamlining.  If you have background content which are ladened with hires textures, displacement maps, and hi poly counts, expect the renders to run longer.  By how much?  Depends on the system.

Ok, I'm trying again . . .

I dumped the background I was using and put in something less complex, with less displacement. I set the camera with an f-stop of 2.8 in order to get a shallow depth of field. I'm running the render with 10 pixel samples this time.

It took 30 minutes to precalculate IDL and subsurface scattering.  We'll see about the rest . . .

Quote - @ Snarly:  you should warn nudity on that link just in case someone is viewing from a work location.

I did. And Violence too. Says so at the top of the post.

Poser DOF is incredibly slow. Fortunately, you can render a depth map (in P9/PP2012 at least), and then either use a Photoshop plugin like DOF Pro (which is easy), or use the depth map as an alpha channel and do some Photoshop magic (which is confusing, and which I have to look up how to do everytime I use it, which is why I bought DOF Pro). If you do DOF in post, you don't want to use post filtering. (If you use it, the depth map either isn't filtered, or is filtered differently, and you get nasty halo effects.) You can alway do post filtering either in postwork, or by taking your render and using it as a self-illuminating background in a subsequent render.

Well, a little over 30 minutes later, the top row has been done . . .  This is progress!

Ten. A bit excessive for what you're getting. I mean: nice image, but ten hours?

Yeah, those were my thoughts, too! What's worse, is that this image is TINY compared to what I typically render.  I did this at 700 x 700 pixels and had to crop the edges because Poser didn't render all the way out, for some reason.

There were other issues, too.  The gown in the render is dynamic. I played with offset and depth to get it as tight-fitting as possible, but where her hands and arms come close to her bosom, the cloth simulation sort of vanished and I had to make all manner of changes to the pose.

It would take MOMENTS to create this kind of image with a camera . . .

Quote - Yeah, those were my thoughts, too! What's worse, is that this image is TINY compared to what I typically render.  I did this at 700 x 700 pixels and had to crop the edges because Poser didn't render all the way out, for some reason.

There were other issues, too.  The gown in the render is dynamic. I played with offset and depth to get it as tight-fitting as possible, but where her hands and arms come close to her bosom, the cloth simulation sort of vanished and I had to make all manner of changes to the pose.

It would take MOMENTS to create this kind of image with a camera . . .

I get DOF preview renders at about 1100 x 900 in less than 5 minutes. But I killed a 4000 x 2900 render with quality settings after 4 hours because it had only done the top 2 rows or so.