but, those fuzzies along the background edges, there has to be a way to improve that?

thanks.

cheers!

Yes, there is a way to improve the quality of the DoF.  Set your render settings for Pixel Sampling to 15.  It will increase your render time but the DoF will sharpen considerably.

Like Hborre says, increasing your pixel samples will smooth the image at the expense of render time (but it will look awesome). I'm a big fan of larger apertures / smaller f-stops for really dramatic DoF.

Have you ever maxed out the pixels?

Theoretically there would be no limit to the amount of sample you could take but I'd say 20-25 would be the practical limit where you would notice no difference in quality.

As Hborre suggests, start at 15 and increase until you get the smoothness you're looking for.

Or render out a non-antialiased zbuffer image and use DOF Pro with Photoshop/Paint Shop Pro/etc. This method also gives you the added advantage of being able to interactively choose a focal point after the render is done.

It won't render a higher pixel sample to save it's life.

I did learn from my night of  Depth Fuzzies,
when Vista crashes Poser during a render, the FFrender.exe keeps on running.

If only there was a 'render to disk' option, like Bryce has.

I was watching TaskManager before the crash, a highlight line was bouncing between Poser.exe and FFrender.exe.

When I need depth of field I use this way:

www.keindesign.de/stefan/poser/dof_tutorial.html

Way faster than the slow Poser option (or try DazStudio 3 one that's really fast, hope SM "fix" this in Poser 8)