What could be wrong with Defocus?

Defocus strange behaviour

Hi guys!

Unfortunately I am not at home now, hence I don’t have a blender file for you. Not for now anyway.
Hopefully you can think of something from the information that follows:

I have tested the effect with a simple setup of just 4 cubes formed in a line, on a plane, a sun-lamp, and the camera. As expected, the camera is looking to all the cubes line, from one end.
Once I have the needed Compositing nodes in place (from left to right: Render layer, defocus, compositing, viewer), then I go to the camera settings in the Properties tab on the left (default), and with the droper choose the cube I want to apear clear, and adjust the… mmm I can’t recall the name of that setting now. Well, it worked with 0.0600. And if I put the Viewport display mode to “rendered”, then I’ll be able to see that things are working on the fly. I may need to do one initial render and keep that “Auto render” feature checked in the Compositing window (at the bottom).

Now, all that is nice and dandy, but when I replicate the very same with the scene where I really want the effect on, it just doesnt pan out the same. Instead the whole area I applied the border to (to select only a small portion of the whole to be rendered), gets blurred, and with too high a value no matter what values I enter.
The only time when I can get some control is if I enter the values for the “Distance” instead of using the dropper. The problem with that method is that no matter what distance values I try, I can never get the important element to appear clear enough.

So, based on the info above, I hope someone can sort of pin point something.

Later on in about 7 hours I will be able to upload a file.

Thanks guys :slight_smile:

You have z depth pass on?

3pointEdit, thank you for asking. If you mean the one in the RenderLayers/Passes/Z, then yes.

It looks like I will get all the info from this one video tut from BornCG.

As soon as I extract the needed info I’ll come back to bring this thread to a closure, so anyone else can benefit too.

J

Hmm, I wonder if there is an issue with the depth pass being limited by the boundary render? You probably have to render the whole frame to get access to the depth component.