Hello all. I have been trying to set blur in an image and have had no luck. What I want is to make the forground items (tree, grass, flowers, etc) stay in focus and add a blur to all the background. I have tried various settings with focus and blur. the image I have attached is set to: focus: 20 , blur: 1%. Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong??? Thanks.. Eryk

You can controle your blur just in setting it well. The sample above shows it. You see a kind of a red box at right and lines at left. Every thing what is between this red lines (inside the "box") will be clear. Every thing outside will be blurred. 1% is not very much, try with 2% or even 5%. You also must know that you have to render your picture in ULTRA to get the effects to work properly. Hope this helps. :-)Guitta

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...ok. So I am setting it up right then, with the box and all. I just had no clue the picture had to be rendered in ultra for the setting to work properly. I was trying to get the proper effect in preview mode . Thanks Guitta...I'll give it a try right now.

hummm...I tried an ultra render (set to 320X240, just to see if it worked) and it didn't.. The entire image is still very blurred. Here is how my setting looks: All the stuff I want clear, I have between the red lines on the left. I am still set to only 1% blur, but the whole image is coming out very blurred. Can you tell me if I still have this set up wrong? Thanks again, Eryk

Eryk, try raising the blur to at least 5%. Then you should be able to discerne a difference between what's "in focus" and what isn't. :)

Thanks Varian...I tried it. 5%, 10%, and out of frustration...35%. Still, all I get is everything out of fucus and blurred, just at various degrees. Any other ideas? I know I must have some setting wrong or something. (in case it matters, I am not using a volumetric atmosphere model)

I find that it is a bit easier to control the effect with a longer focal length such as 80mm or more. Also the focus zone being a bit longer behind the focal point than in front (as with a real camera) you may want to set the focal point just a bit in front of the subject that is to be in focus. Gilbert

Gilbert is right. Mostly it works better with a longer focal lenght. In this pic I used focal 40 and blur 5%. Only 1 plant is inside the red lines, as you can see. The distance between the plants is quite big, especially the tree is far away. The front plant is very close to the cam. In the pic you show above, it seems that also the plants in front are outside the red lines, at least the leaves. Possibly that the cam doesn't recognice the first line, because it seems to be inside the cam. Guitta

Thanks Gilbert and Guitta... I tried what you both said and it is working now! I just need to settle on a setting. After I changed the focal length to 80mm , it started working. Hopefully I will have a new image up soon. Thank you all again, Eryk