Hello there,

I read a tutorial explaining how to use the Depth of Field option in the render settings. The purpose is make part of an image blurred depending on its distance to a specific object in the picture. This must be done rendering with Firefly and Depth of Field selected.

Well it wouldn't work for me on my PC using Vista : when I start the rendering, when it gets to the point where the render should start progressing, the progress is instantaneous (render bar fills up immediately) but no picture starts to be drawn and I have to end up by "terminating" Poser.

I tried the same thing using Windows 2000 and it worked ! (But the result of the blur isn't great unfortunately at all, very edgy).

I'm using VIsta Ultimate 32 bits, with NVIdia 7800 GTS card and lastest drivers. Any idea what's wrong ? Normal Firefly renders work fine.

Thanks in advance for any input.

Lunedust

Make sure you have the latest service release for Poser installed (SR 2.1), it fixes some problems that earlier releases had in certain scenes with depth of field. Are you rendering in a separate process? If so, does anything change when using the internal process?

Thanks for your input,

Looking in general preferences I noticed that I didn't select Render in Different Process, should I ? My PC is Dual Core so perhaps I should use multiple processes ? If so, how many threads is good to select ? I did select Adaptive bucket size.

I'm using Poser 7.0.2.132.

Hope this helps you to help me :)

Lunedust

I checked "Separate Process" in the render tab of general preferences, and selected two threads.

I made a simple scene with two props, one far behind the other. I checked Depth of field and Smooth polygons in the render settings (Quality : Auto Settings : Final). I calculated with a Python script the distance to the barrel and inserted that distance (in feet) into the focus_distance dial of the main camera.

After pressing the render button I received a message about my Firewall and ffrender.exe, choosing to let it pass through.

The render worked this time, apparently when using just one process earlier, the Firewall message was behind something else and was invisible, blocking the whole process. Weird that a normal firefly render didn't have the same effect ! Anyway here is the result and I must admit I don't like the blur that much, any way to make it render better ?

Thanks again for your help

Lunedust