Alternative DOF?

[Wim Roegels]

Hi wim,

How are you?

Just try a so called ‘search engine’ – you just put in some words and voila.

I think I, I mean you were thinking about LENSCARE from FRISCHLUFT.

https://www.frischluft.com/lenscare/lenscare.php

See you soon.

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Best regards

wim

[Barend Onneweer]

🙂

Lenscare is spectacularly cool. But unfortunately you can’t just replace the built-in DoF blur for 3D comps with Lenscare…

You’d need a depth-matte to control the lensblur. I use Buena Depth Cue for that. It’s a bit of an annoying workaround and somewhat slow to render, but in many cases I find it worth the hassle, to replace the ugly built-in depth blur with Lenscare.

Bar3nd

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Wim Roegels]

OK, I DL the demo installed (1.4) it and now I am wondering how to use it.

I have a 3D comp and made a effect layer (german ‘Einstellungsebene’) and applied lenscare to it.

Unfortunatly without a effect.

How do I get a propper grayscale layer for z depth of the comp to put it in lenscare?

Or is the a easier way?

Hope some can help … $199 … better to figure out before investing … thanks!

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Best regards

wim

[Wim Roegels]

Thanks for the reply!

Did I get you right: with ‘Buena Depth Cue’ I get the grayscale depth of field information to feed into lenscare?

Sounds good …

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Best regards

wim

[Mylenium]

[Wim Roegels] “How do I get a propper grayscale layer for z depth of the comp to put it in lenscare?”

You can’t. Either you buy yet another plugin (Depth Cue) or you create your depth map manually using Ramps or tweaking opacity of white&black layers in a duplicate comp.

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Barend Onneweer]

[Wim Roegels] ”

Did I get you right: with ‘Buena Depth Cue’ I get the grayscale depth of field information to feed into lenscare?”

I’m not near my workstation right now, but roughly it goes like this: you open the 3D composition you want to add DoF to. Make sure DoF is disabled for the camera. After installing Depth Cue, there are a couple of new menu options, one of which is ‘Precompose Depth’.

When you do this, Depth Cue creates a duplicate of your 3D comp, with all layers having the depth effect applied.

You end up with two identical comps, one of which is your depth matte.

Drag both comps into a third comp. Turn off visibility for the depth matte. Apply Lenscare to the other comp, and set its depth source to the depth layer.

It’s a bit of a workaround. Changes in the 3D comp aren’t automatically copied in the depth comp. So you really want to wait with this until you’re completely satisfied with the 3D comp, or you’ll end up removing and redoing the depth comp a couple of times.

Not the prettiest or fastest solution. But it works.

Bar3nd

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Wim Roegels]

Thanks!

I am right now playing around with the demos … would be an double investment ($200 each) but the look gets really (!) much better (as far as I can tell, with the demo beautifull demo marks) … anyway.

As you mentioned in terms of workflow its not the best, but if you do the depth tweaking at last, I guess its quite ok.

But as playing around I have a problem and I am not shure whether I am thinking the right way for solution …

I have a 3D TEXT with some arranged text layers in depth and placed it in my MAIN COMP (colapsed, to get the right 3D pos) to do the flytroughs and add some other elements … and if I try to get the ‘Depth Comp’, the Text Comp is ignored and only the position of the layer in the MAIN COMP is used. And as result the gryscale value does not change according the the camera movement.

BTW: The source text of the textlayer it self is created by an expression.

Do I have to a ‘tripple nesting’ and combine the layers manually?
1. TEXT COMPn (comps with each text element)
2. TEXT 3D COM (all TEXT COMPs positioned in space)
3. MAIN COMP (TEXT 3D COMP as collapsed layer)

And to get the DOF Info …
1. in MAIN COMP do a ‘Precomse Depth’
2. in TEXT 3D COMP do a ‘Precomse Depth’
3. Combine these in another comp an use a proper layer blending mode
4. Finally use this COMP as 3D info for lenscare

… bzzz …
I am just writing about it without doing it, because the project is quite complex and it would take a lot of time to just ‘test it’ … maybe you can understnd, what I am talking about and say: yes sir, we can boogie.

😉

What do you think?

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Best regards

wim