Depth of field with physical camera

[fuzzion]

Beautiful answer. I have actually given up on DOF with outdoor scenes

[panixia]

i strongly suggest to render the z-depht channel and then put it in the alpha channel spot in photoshop so you can use it as an alpha channel for lens blur.
simple and effective.
moreover it seriously decrease the render time, and most important to me is that this workaround allows you to do a single render and quickly create countless variation in PS without having to render it countless time.
in photoshop also you have a real-time preview of what are you doing in terms of strenght and radius of blurriness.

[valerostudio]

+1 on ZDepth channel. Much more flexible and faster render times.

[andybot]

except for the slight problem of reflections...

[panixia]

mmm.. why?

[andybot]

Take a look at the countertop in this example. The doors and trees beyond are not blurred when using the mask because the reflection is not calculated in the zdepth pass.

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[valerostudio]

Oh, that's a good one. This is very interesting.

[panixia]

ah ok.. never noticed it before..
very intersting..

[monkers]

Has anyone managed to work this out for large scenes?

I have a job in large scene and I would like to blur out the background in Vray.

I have tried the Z-depth work around but it blurs out details in the foreground - I know with a bit of photoshopping this could be fixed. But I would rather just batch render over night.

Heres some images of my scenes

Without DOF

With DOF from zdepth see how the crane detail blurs out.

[monkers]

I managed to figure this out if anyone is interested here's the settings i used

the result.