setting depth of field in cycles???

I sthere a more controlable way to set up depth of field. Say I have a close up scene. An object on a plane like lets say a nice set of headphones. I set the camera focus distance by dragging in the numeric field till the indicator is where I want. So its no problem to get the camera to focus to the right distance but say I want objects a couple feet back frthe headphones to be completly blurred out. I cant seem to set the aperature radius right. Basically I want there to be more “contrast” in the depth effect. Is this possible???

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Here is a nice little tutorial on leveraging Cycles DOF in metric units.

http://www.3danimationplus.com/tutorials/how-to-use-f-stop-in-blender-cycles/

Thanx. 2 more questions. I always use blender units. In the example above a blender unit equals one inch so its to scale. Will this work as well as using real units. I was advised once to stick with blender units. It works well for me. And also, would I have better results doing the depth of field effect in the compositor. What is the difference between doing it in compositor or right in the render?? Thank you.

Another question regarding that tutorial about realistic depth of field. What is camera clipping for. Dont you just set the limits to the max for close and faraway. I dont understand??

Hi,

With camera start/end clipping you can set from where the camera should start and end see/render.
You can actually have the camera outside a wall or (box in my example) and have the camera start render from the start clipping point as well as telling it where to stop.

Cheers


That’s not how it works: You can’t simply interpret 1 Blenderunit (BU) as any arbitrary unit of measurement. Modeling to scale means modeling to real world scale. And that means:

1 BU = 1m = 3.281 feet.

Just change the units in the scene settings to Metric or Imperial and you will see Blender doing that conversion for you.

DOF from the renderer is (well, mostly) physically correct, the DOF from the compositor is fake and can give quite unsatisfactory results, especially in problematic cases like DOF through transparent objects or along object borders. Should be much faster, though.

I find it’s a lot easier/faster to set the camera’s focus target to an empty object than to use distance. The focal point is at an object’s defined center so placing an empty where you want focus is also better than setting the camera to focus on a subject’s mesh. Then it’s just a matter of messing with aperture settings to control how strong the DOF effect is. I know enough about photography, so I use the F-stop mode instead of aperture diameter because I find it more predictable. Takes a lot of the guesswork out of it.