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Creating Depth of Field

In real life, it is rare that all objects around us are in focus all the time, so why should it be any different in your scene? To add a sense of realism to a scene, you can add some depth of field, which is an effect that simulates a plane of maximum sharpness and blurs objects in front of, close to, or beyond this plane.

	High Depth of Field With a far depth of field setting, only objects farther from the camera are in focus.
	Low Depth of Field With a near depth of field, only objects close to the camera are in focus.

To use the depth field

• Do one of the following:

- You can use a lens shader such as a Depth of Field shader that takes multiple samples using different paths to reach the same point on the focus plane to interpolate the depth effect.

or

- You can use an output shader that collects depth information during rendering and then applies a blurring filter as a post-processing step over the finished image.

A camera imported from a SOFTIMAGE|3D scene may already have a depth of field shader attached to it.

Applying a Depth of Field Shader

You can apply any of the depth of field shaders available from the shader library within SOFTIMAGE|XSI.

To set depth of field shader

1. Select a camera and display its property editor (choose Modify > Shader).

2. On the Camera tab, set the camera’s projection method to Perspective.

3. On the Lens Shaders tab, the lens shader stack appears. Click Add to open a browser.

4. From the shader library, select the depth of field lens shader from the Lens folder and click OK to attach the shader to the selected camera.

5. To edit the lens shader’s parameters, open its property editor by clicking the Inspect button while the shader is selected in the shader stack.

6. Set its parameters such as the Focal Length, F-Stop, and focal Distance to the values you want.

These settings work the same way as on a physical camera. The options define the focus (sharpness) of objects according to their distance from the camera, similar to the way a real camera works.

Depth of field lets you set the minimum and maximum distance from the camera for objects to be in focus. Objects closer than the minimum distance and farther than the maximum distance become increasingly out-of-focus.

For more information on setting parameters for the depth of field lens shader, refer to Depth of Field.

SOFTIMAGE|XSI v.6.01     <     >