Re: Combustion Depth of Field Blur

Hi,

It would be impossible to explain everything about DOF in Combustion or any app in a single post but to give you a place to start Combustion can create DOF blurs using the 3D Depth of Field operator or a G-Buffer Builder operator and a 3D Depth of Field operator.

If you are using the 3D Depth of Field operator you will need to render your 3d scene to the file format of RLA or RPF and make sure you have included the channels needed to create the affect. If you want to use the G-Buffer Builder, which I recommend, you will still need a Z-Depth pass from either a 3D app or you can create one in Combustion. The Z-depth pass is a grayscale image or footage that Combustion will use to determine what is close to the camera and what is further away from the camera. Then use the Z-Depth pass as the Z-Buffer input on the G-Buffer Builder tool and apply the 3D DOF operatorabove the GB Builder then you'll be able to create the DOF affect.

I recommend always rendering the Z-Depth at a higher bit depth than 8-bit. The more grays values in teh image the better the result and you will have less artifacts issues.
You should check out the manual in Combustion for a more detailed explanation.

Ken LaRue
Autodesk Application Engineer
Combustion / Toxik / Flame
Combustion Training DVDs
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