Hey so I was trying some new things out I haven't really touched yet in CG and DOF came to mind so I decided to give it a go. I tried several different things out first like DOF nodes out of maya renderer and DOF nodes out of Mental Ray but I don't really want to sit here for years while they render out SO I decided to give z depth a chance. I found several different articles and tutorials on it and probably 18 miles worth of threads on CGTalk so I knew the material was there for me to learn I just needed to apply it. I decided to go with the crappy way of doing it... I setup a ramp with a projection map and made a separate render layer so I could gain more control over my depth of field. I know this isn't the right way of doing it but it was the fastest and allowed for more control so I didn't have to do a whole lot of nonsense compositing for animated DOF and focal point shifting. Ill be posting 2 renders along with an animation I put together with what Ive cooked up in Maya and Nuke. I know the DOF animation isn't realistic it's just there to prove I understand the concept and make Robert laugh at me.
I wish I could post my photos in the correct order but whatever this one is the z depth composite that took 1 minute to render the beauty pass, 5 seconds to render the z depth pass and like no seconds to render the composite out of nuke.
This is the mia_lens_bokeh render that took like hmm 20+ hours to render and theres STILL crap on the lens (noise).
