In my recent project I am in a situation where in real life I would want to tilt my focal plane - so I want in Blender too. Surprisingly I am unable to find any setting for this 2.77a. I am unable to find any information about this other then ways to fake tilt/shift effects. Is it too naive to think that this feature has to be hidden somewhere or am I simply to **** to find it?
If it is not implemented, is there a plugin or any other way already figured out to make this work?
(I’m not going for any of these tilt/shift style street shots where you just could add an gradient masked blur to fake this and I really would like to avoid handpainting a mask here)
Hello Ricky, thanks for your reply! Unfortunately this ist not what I’m looking for. I don’t know if I’m using the right terms for you CG guys so I will try to explain further.
On real world view cameras you are not only able to shift lens plane and film plane independently but also tilt them. With no adjustments it works like almost any other camera were focus is only determined by distance to the camera (ideally) which gives a focal plane like the red marked in my picture.
By tilting only the lens upwards and keeping the film plane in place the focal plane tilts in the same direction so when adjusted right in my example you’ll get the focal plane aligned with the green line and everything on it will be captured sharp. You can look up “Scheimpflug principle” if you are interested (Sorry, not allowed to post links yet).
The difference between tilting the camera up and the shifting the lens down to get to the same view and the desired focal plane (which I know would work perfectly in blender) and only shifting the lens is that first changes the perspective, second does not.
Hope I could make it a little more understandable and not ultimately confused you
Hey Karl, thanks for your reply! It is kind of related but not what I’m looking for. I’ve edited the post above and added a link to an article with further explanation and image samples!
Just to keep you up to date: I found a way to generate an altered depth mask to use in compositing. Have a few problems to sort out, when it’s working properly I’ll update with a detailed description.
Would still prefer a way to directly render the proper DOF since compositing might run into some problems with stronger blurring. So I’m still hoping for someone to help me out.
You have to line up the camera perpendicularly to the desired focal plane, then shift the camera along Y until you get the right shot.
But of course the perspective changes.
It’s not exactly the same thing, sourvinos. A tilt-shift lens allows for the tilting of the focal plane and the shifting of the perspective plane. Blender only has control for the former. OriginalSin needs the latter.
As someone who is a bit of a photography enthusiast who used to own a Nikon tilt-shift lens, I know what you’re asking for, OriginalSin. I’ve tried to recreate the effect myself in Blender. Faking it in post is the only way to go, unfortunately.
Just realized that RenderMan has got this feature in its Blender Bridge. Didn’t try it out but will.
Still no progress on the post effects because it’s giving me some weird edges where blurring is too different but that’s anoter topic. At least getting an almost physically correct DOF-Map
Just to bring this to an end, here are some testing results:
Cycles with blur added in post with custom hacky rendered defocus map. Didn’t take care of any artifacts here to point out the advantage of rendered DOF:
A tilt-shift lens allows for the tilting of the focal plane and the shifting of the perspective plane. Blender only has control for the former. OriginalSin needs the latter.
