Aperture: One-Click Autofocus in Blender

Automatically focus your scenes in seconds

Aperture makes it a breeze to add a depth of field to your scenes, by working like a real camera to automatically focus where you want, giving you more time to create beautiful animations.

It’s the complete solution for applying autofocus to any of your scenes, allowing you to:

  • Focus your Blender camera in a single click
  • Autofocus anywhere in your frame
  • Focus quickly for fast moving scenes, or slowly, like a real camera. It’s up to you

Blender Market link

Let’s face it, focusing in Blender used to be a chore

If you’d like to add some depth of field to your Blender scene, your choices are limited. You can dial this in manually, which might work for very simple scenes with no movement, but even then you’ll have to spend time tweaking to get the focusing plane exactly right.

You can pick an object to focus on, but Blender will actually focus on the origin of the object, and not the surface. So, for objects which are close to the camera, or when you are using a very narrow depth of field, the focus will be noticeably off. Never mind if you want to change focus between objects.

The third option, which is the only real option for complex scenes with movement, is to focus on an empty, and manually keyframe this to move where you want your focus to be. But for this to work effectively, you need to insert multiple keyframes, which is time-consuming and might lead to inconsistent or unrealistic focusing speed between each change in focus.

Now, you can apply autofocus to your scenes quickly and effortlessly, with a single click

Add autofocus to your scenes in a single click. It’s that simple. No need to create empties where you want to focus, or spend time tweaking the focus distance until it’s exactly where you want. Click one button to intelligently focus the camera.

Benefit #1 - Focus Anywhere in your Scene

The wide range of built in focus regions means that you can instantly focus on your subject, whether it is in the center, left third, or moving through a large part of your scene. But if you need something more bespoke, you can create your own custom focusing region as easily as you can draw a bounding box.

Benefit #2 - Don’t let your Focus Point Jump Around

Real cameras don’t instantly know where to focus, and you can achieve realistic, smooth, focus pulls using Aperture’s intuitive settings. Or, depending on your scene, you can use Aperture’s diverse range of other features while focusing instantly on the subject at hand.

Benefit #3 - Don’t Just Focus on One Frame, Focus on Every Frame

Lots of objects moving in and out of frame? No problem. Aperture will pull focus for every frame, and keyframe this movement for you. This means that no matter whether you are working on a short clip, or a feature length animation, Aperture has you covered.

Benefit #4 - Apply Depth of Field to your Scenes in Seconds

In testing, Aperture applied autofocus to low memory scenes in under a second for the whole animation. Even highly complex scenes apply autofocus quickly by utilizing efficient, optimised code.

But why do I need a plug-in?

You might have seen techniques that show you ways to achieve autofocus inside Blender without a plug-in. But they have some important limitations which Aperture solves.

  • Existing techniques only work with ONE OBJECT. Aperture sees your entire scene just like a physical camera, and can focus on any object, even when you pan to a different part of your see.
  • With Aperture, you’re not limited to focusing in the exact center, like other techniques. If the wide-range of focus regions isn’t enough, you can draw your own and focus exactly where you want to in the scene.
  • Aperture allows you to pull focus smoothly, using a variety of settings. This replicates a real focusing camera, which doesn’t react instantaneously.
  • Aperture works with a single click. No need to tediously set up shrinkwrap modifiers for every new scene where you want to apply autofocus.

Lifetime access and all future updates included for free

For this one-time purchase, receive lifetime access to the script, as well as access to all future updates. No tiers, no optional upgrades, get all the convenient features above for the same great price. Amazing value for anyone looking to level up their Blender animation game.

8 Likes

dear moby motion,

I just wanted to let you know how awesome I find this autofocus addon: very! :slight_smile:

the unique features -

  1. using an adjustable focus area to find the best focus distance (as opposed to a single point in the center of the camera view)

  2. option that lets you correct for infinitely far away measurement points

  3. multiple settings to smooth the movement of the focuspoint to simulate the behaviour of real cameras

  • seem to make this the only usable autofocus addon for animation that I know of. I have tried the free ‘real camera’ addon in my animations and - all my respect for the authors of this addon and its auto exposure feature - the lack of these features makes its autofocus practically unusable for my taste. focus distance is hardly ever correct, jumps to points that are way too far away of the aimed target and changes in focus distance don’t look aesthetically pleasing / erratic. afaik the ‘photographer 4’ addon’s autofocus also lacks all of the mentioned features.

I’m truly looking forward to actually trying out ‘aperture’ once I saved up enough cash. keep it going with addons like this one!

kind regards,
oyster

Latest version now released! This is probably the biggest update so far, many of these improvements have been made possible by a refactored focusing engine. Feel free to send me more feature requests here or on Blender Market :slight_smile:

  • Baking autofocus no longer makes Blender unresponsive (most requested feature).
  • Baking autofocus visualises which frame it’s working on, so you can see progress.
  • Baking autofocus is cancellable by pressing “escape” during focus.
  • Now officially supports 3.5.
  • Clicking “stop showing focus region” disables render region - preventing accidentally rendering only part of the scene that you were focusing on.
  • Refactored focusing engine.
  • Delete focus keyframes for your current camera at the press of a button (for pro only).
  • Improved UI for Advanced Settings menu.
1 Like