I want to have a couple objects in focus on a project I’m working on, as well as varying levels of blur in the back/foreground. Does anyone have any tips or know of a tutorial that might be helpful in achieving this effect?
DOF doesn’t really work that way, so you may want to reconsider how you are trying to achieve the effect you are looking for.
True DOF will have a single focus point (actually an arc along the focus distance), and anything not at that distance will become out of focus. This is all controllable by focal length and amount of blur, but will depend on your composition. It is not possible in a real scenario to have objects at different depths to be in focus while areas between are not in focus. Fortunately, when doing things in CG you don’t have to do it properly, so you can fake things however you wish.
If you want several objects to be a point of focus, you will need to either compromise by placing the focal point in the middle of the objects, or fake the DOF by rendering foreground/background separately, and then doing the blur in the compositor. That method will give you the most control over what is in/out of focus.
If you could describe with a bit more detail what you are trying to do I can help further.
blur the image twice each with a different focal point and combine them together maybe using the z pass?
Yeah, light field camera addon would be best for this, but I would suggest masking and using masks to determine the amount of blur in your image, however, you can use the z combine node as well!
“Focus stacking” is simply a compositing process. The real question here is going to be that the finished image looks “realistic.”