I decided to check to see if Poser really does do this sort of thing accurately. So I set up a simple scene with three Andys, positioned at 4 metres, 6 metres and 10 metres from the camera.

The camera's lens is set at 50mm. The only parameters I changed in this test were the Focus Distance and Aperture - the values are shown, you'll need to look at the bigger image for it to be useful.

The conclusion is that Poser does the depth of field thing accurately, at least for a 50mm lens. The top 3 images are to test the advice I gave above; let me briefly explain the last two.

On number 4 I set focus distance to 1000M (because there's no 'infinity' settingin Poser), and I'd expect a real-world 50mm lens focused on infinity and set to its narrowest aperture (f64 is a bit extreme) to have everything in apparent sharp focus (unless it was a few centimetres from the lens).

For number 5 I've focused just in front (15cm = 6 inches) of the closest Andy and kept the same narrow aperture, and as I'd predict from a real lens, closest Andy is just coming into sharp focus while those at 6M and 10M are soft.

So there you are. The key to creating depth-of-field effects is in knowing where to set focus and which aperture to use; and if you have photographic experience you can use that in Poser quite predictably.

 

---

Windows 10 x64 Pro - Intel Xeon E5450 @ 3.00GHz (x2)

PoserPro 11 - Units: Metres

Adobe CC 2017