From the course: OctaneRender for Cinema 4D Essential Training

Depth of field

From the course: OctaneRender for Cinema 4D Essential Training

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Depth of field

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- [Narrator] So let's look at how we'd work with depth of field with our OctaneCamera tag. We've got this octopus loaded up into the live viewer and what we'd like to do with this particular angle is have the head in focus and maybe the tentacles at the back and the front slightly out of focus. So what we can do is come into our OctaneCamera tag and in the Thinlens tab, we can focus on this area here, and this is all to do with our depth of field and the look of the bokeh and all that kind of stuff. So the main controls we need to focus on here are the Auto Focus, Focal Depth, Aperture, and Fstop. This is gonna do all the work for us. So if we uncheck Auto Focus and we can choose the focus picker from the live viewer and just click around here, that will set our focal depth for us. You come over to the camera in the object, you can see that the focus distance is matching what we have in the OctaneCamera tag. So with that set, what we need to do is adjust the aperture to achieve some depth of field. So the aperture determines how much light enters the camera lens. And so a large aperture produces a narrow depth of field and a small aperture produces a wide depth of field. So to have a narrow depth of field we need to increase this value by quite a lot and we're gonna go up to something like six. And now you can see that we have the tentacle in the rear out of focus, our face is in focus, and this is slightly out of focus as well. And you can, of course, exaggerate this effect like so, by increasing the aperture. You'll notice that the fstop goes down considerably as we do so. Now, these aren't real-world values, that's because this isn't a real-world scale object. If we just come back to six and just come out of this camera, if I create, say, a sphere, this is a 100 centimeter sphere and about half of it is covering the octopus so it's about 50 centimeters. I mean, we're looking at, like, a plastic toy. And so if it was scaled down and everything was sort of on a lower scale then you could actually key in some real-world values. So just bear that in mind when you're creating your scenes, as scene scale does have a contribution on how these values work. So let's just look at another example. We've got this other camera here. We're gonna uncheck Auto Focus. We just disable pick focus, if you hold down control and middle mouse button you can actually pick the focus like so. So you can see now we've picked that area, and again, increase the aperture. And we'll start to see that depth of field. And it's really fast, it's really responsive, if we bump this up to, say, 25, and we start to pick different areas, see how quickly that resolves and gives us a result. And so we can just work nice and fast and fluidly, just to dial in where we want the depth of field effect to be and how strong it needs to be. And of course, this is way too strong for the scale of this object. It just looks kind of ridiculous to me. So I'm just gonna bring this back down to something like six, and I think that's a bit better, it's more of a subtle effect. And so finally, let's just come onto our other camera here, and we'll leave Auto Focus checked on for the moment. Let's increase the aperture, and you'll see how we didn't even have to set a focal depth and we're getting an effect of this depth of field. That's because Octane is gonna automatically focus the camera for us. With this selected, we could just move in and out and it will adjust for us if we just come right in here. You can see it's doing an okay kinda job, but we might need to help it out. So what I'll do is just pick the focus here. And of course we need to uncheck Auto Focus if we do that and now the eyes should be nice and sharp. So we can just undo that view, and you can see, because of the changes we've made, without Auto Focus on, it's just gonna be looking at that depth, so you'll end up with-- Well, it's all out of focus, isn't it? So we'll just need to re-pick the focus and work that way. So something to bear in mind, the auto focus can be useful particularly if you're just moving your cameras around a lot and haven't got the final positioning right. And so you can check that on, and the image will remain in focus. So the key things to remember are your scene scale, your object scale, and just dialing the aperture in conjunction with the fstop and focal length to create the kind of depth of field effects that you require for your scene.

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