Saturday, January 29, 2011

Depth of Field


I'm a shameless Gundam fan so this was kind of fun to make. It's another depth of field test using a Z-depth map, which I'd like to quickly explain how it works, if you're interested.

Basically, when you're setting up your Vray rendering paramaters, click on the "Render Elements" tab and click Vray_Zdepth. You type in a min and max number (the min being the closest thing you want in focus, the max being the furthest away object.) and it will render a z-depth map along with your beauty pass, and it looks like this:


You import this image into photoshop's channel tab and use it as an alpha map for your rendered image. This map tells photoshop what is close and what isn't, the lighter the image, the closer the object is to the camera. You can use this on the Lens Blur filter for simulating a realistic depth of field, among other things.


And this is what I did yesterday. I was making this to see how easily depth-of-field can create the sense of miniaturized models. A few friends commented saying they looked like a small scale-model of actual buildings, so I think I got the desired effect.

Anyways, hope you guys have an amazing weekend!

Cheers,
Sam  

16 comments:

  1. that looks great! i studied 2d animation although i think i would've been able to make more of a career studying 3d.

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  2. That's pretty impressive, mate.

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  3. pretty good info here, thanks for the tips.

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  4. Impressive!

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  5. you sir, now have a fan, keep it up!





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  6. Little over my head. I better follow you, I feel like the only girl who isn't good at photography.

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  7. recomend any locations to get this program?

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  8. Thanks for the comments and support guys, I really do appreciate it. If you're interested in CG at all, pick up the 30 day trial of 3ds max or maya, and buy/watch the intro to Maya/3ds/whatever videos from Gnomon or Digital Tutors. That's the best way to do it.

    Or you could be like me and just keep messing with the software with very limited tutorial work for like 7 years, since I was 12 in fact.

    :D

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  9. Looks interesting. I always wondered how they did that.

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  10. that's so cool... could you post more miniature versions of real life stuff?

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  11. you have a fantastic eye, that building scale is perfect.

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  12. Those are some pretty awesome pictures. Impressive as usual!

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