I started playing around with DOF in Lux and boy is is it much simpler than the node based solution we use for the internal renderer. Simply activate DOF in LuxBlend, set your target distance and adjust your lens. It also has a nice feature where you can type in an object’s name and it will automatically set the DOF distance for that object. Kind of a handy calculator for getting the distance between two objects.
Also, the added benefit of being able to turn any object in to a light source is still a ton of fun to play around with. In this scene there are two light groups, the world (which is an angular map from m@dcows post) and the cube itself. One of the nice things about light groups is that not only can you adjust the brightness of a lamp after it is rendered, but you can also adjust the color of the light as well.
These images are the result of 878 samples from an overnight render of about 7 hours using the Metropolis recommended settings.
In blender, select the camera, under DOF type the object name you want to focus on, then render, in the nodes create a defocus node etc, turn of No Zbuffer, lower Fstop, strong DOF, higher Fstop, less DOF, threshold is for control how much it filters the edges, Gamma correction, well that one speaks for itself, bokeh type (with filter) determines how objects (usually lights) in the blurred background (foreground?) are filterd (think it affects shape as well), and finally maxblur, you can just leave this at 0 unless you want to fine tune the DOF strength (along with the Fstop).
By the way the tests are looking very nice, Lux is an amazing render engine, espeically with it’s real time tone mapping and affects
