DOF...

I'm starting to gather things together in scenes so I can start rendering backgrounds and make final settings for rendering as several shots are almost complete. While setting up a final HeroCam, I considered DOF. I knew that my renders where already slightly heavy, but after learning that the mia_bokeh lens node is faster, I decided to give it a try.

A tiny test on part of an image proved fairly quickly that DOF was too expensive to do in Maya. But, for funsies I wanted to see what a red heart as the bokeh would do. This is what I got.


It took over an hour and half to render the one image. I probably wouldn't use the heart bokeh look, but the added dimension from the DOF is really satisfying to me, so I thought I'd post it.

Since giving up on rendering DOF in maya, I learned today that my school possess a license of Lenscare(it had apparently been forgotten about for the last 5 years) for After Effects which I'm told works rather nice for DOF. So hopefully in a week or so, I'll get to see what that looks like.