Alright, I am having an issue with an animation I am making. Everything worked fine when I first mad eit, but for some reason now when I go back and edit it one camera is rendering everything really strangely. What I mean by that is that different objects which were flush with each other in all the other cameras are not showing up at different depths. Not only that, but the depths chosen change frame by frame even though the objects move. It isn’t by much, but it shows up a lot of bad seams and creates a flickering effect when turned into a movie.
Any idea what is causing this? My other cameras are fine, and there are no settings different between them all.
Edit: This is the only camera which has a limit of 200, however, changing the limit down to a more normal level does not change anything other than allow the Defocus node to work (apparently it doesn’t like to work at limits of 200). But the problem of the varying depths or flat objects stays the same.
Try selecting the camera and make it active with CTRL+0. Snap the 3D cursor to it with Shift+F+4. Add a new camera select the trouble maker’s IPO to share with the new camera, and finally delete the troublemaker. Hopefully that will put an end to the madness.
As for defocus I haven’t had any trouble out of it, but you need to set the camera’s “DoFDist:” parameters to get anything descent from the DoF node. There’s also a script lurking somewhere that will allow you to tie the camera’s focal distance to an empty so that you don’t have to animate the DoF factor. I haven’t used it but I’m just about ready to try it out.
Worked like a beut. my friend, thank you. I had duplicated it, which of course didn’t help. But I hadn’t thought of simply starting over with a new one and the same IPO curves, thanks. You saved me a ton of time.
As for the defocus node, it works great for me, except when I set the camera limit to 200. For some reason it just really doesn’t seem to like that number. Not sure why to be honest, but for that shot it doesn’t matter too much so I’m not worried.
I am getting it to work better finally. I noticed that my near limit on that one camera was set to 0.0, not 0.1. That made the entire image become defocused, unless my upper limit was 200 and then it didn’t seem to use the node at all. Changing the lower limit has allowed the upper limit to work now (for the most part of course).
I love this program, but there are so many tiny little details that if you mess up your entire render is toast until you fix them. Thanks for your help again.
That’s the beauty of the compositor. You can update the post without having to re-render the image. Unfortunately the camera settings aren’t in the compositor, but given time those settings may work their way into the compositor. I haven’t used the DoF node a lot so I’m not sure of all it’s capabilities.