Feature suggestion -Depth of field preview

[Aktion]

Being a keen macro photographer, I love depth of field and the markings you got on the old school camera lenses.

I wondered if there was a way to replicate that visual indication within the 'Position the scenes view' window.
Maybe by having a front and back focus rectangle/plane that changes based on the depth of fiend entered. As pictured below.
Or possibly a large transparent cube so that you can rotate the model to check the depth of field from different angles?
Purple plane is the back focus, the green one the front focus.

I realise this doubles up with the depth of fiend setting in the render window. But feel that having something that shows you visually on the model without having to do a render first would be very useful.

Depth of field mock up - Purple face is the back focus, Green face front front focus

dof-mockup.jpg (41.32 KiB) Viewed 7668 times

Resulting render (sorry it's not the same angle, I accidentally moved the camera.)

Final render based off DOF preview

dof.jpg (107.28 KiB) Viewed 7667 times

[Ecuadorian]

Hi, I had not seen your posts here before.

So basically, what you want is a semi-transparent "focus plane" perpendicular to the camera

[flipya]

In the rare occasions that I use limited DOF in CG I try to do it in pp. And in the extra-rare occasions that I render it I use a calculator. But I still think it's a pretty neat idea to be able to get some sort of preview.

[Chris]

With the View Tool, I tried to come up with something to indicate the focus plane, but wasn't able to create anything I really liked. I put in a secondary line 'axis' to represent the focus point, but it's not terribly useful. Unfortunately SU doesn't provide a lot of great mechanisms for what you are asking for. Yes, I can draw a plane but whether I can make it semi-transparent or not is uncertain.

[Aktion]

...So basically, what you want is a semi-transparent "focus plane" perpendicular to the camera

Hi thanks for the nice welcome. Yeah a transparent plane in front of, and be behind the focus point relative to the camera.

I can see the logic in doing DOF in post production via depth maps, as it makes for a far more flexible work flow saving you from having to re-render all your work if the DOF isn't correct.

Chris, if a semi transparent plane is not achievable, would there be a way to have multiple horizontal (back focus) and vertical (front focus) dotted lines that achieve the same goal.
There's a potential that you'd end up with a visual mess of lines if you have a complicated model to work with.
I'm sure you guys have more important things to work on at the moment. I just thought it would be great to have some kind of visual indication.

I appreciate your suggestions. I'm still very new to this, so don't have my work flow sorted yet.

[dtr]

Hi All

A couple of maybe options are:
XraySelection.rb
For selective transparency in SU.
Vitrite.exe
http://download.cnet.com/Vitrite/3000-2 ... 79850.html
This allows a selected window to have variable transparency.
Works inside or out of applications .

dtr

XraySelection.zip

(1.46 KiB) Downloaded 503 times