Re: Combustion Depth of Field Blur

Hi Carlos,

Unfortunately Combustions camera does not have an option such as that.

There are a couple ways to achieve this but depending on the complexity of the comp it can get tricky.

If the comp is simple you can create a Z-Depth pass in Combustion using the paint tools. Meaning I have created paint shapes that match the shape of my layers or objects and used different levels of gray to create the Z-Depth pass. I could then feed that paint layer into the Z-Buffer input of the G-Buffer Builder.

If you comp is very complex and you have a lot of animation in Z or a lot of masking work it might be better to make a copy of you comp and then replace all the footage sources with solid footage with different levels of gray again remembering white is close to the camera and black is further away.

I then render that comp and use the render as the input on the G-Buffer builder's Z Buffer input. Then I add a blur to the rendered file before the GB input this allows you to soften the edges of the gray values.

You could also add the blur to the grayscale version of the comp and blur it then. This allows you to render the Z-Depth at a higher bit depth like 16 bits which will improve the DOF. I have also combined the 2 methods above when needed. I hope that helps even though there is not such a feature native to Combustion’s cameras.

Ken LaRue
Autodesk Application Engineer
Combustion / Toxik / Flame
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