I’m trying to do a scene where a candle is on fire and the fire and smoke are done with 2.5’s smoke simulation. I also have the camera zoomed in far and am using defocus to make depth of field. Here’s the first test render:
(click images to enlarge)
As you can see, there are multiple problems here:
- The smoke system’s volumetric material doesn’t defocus properly
- The smoke system’s domain shows borders
- The depth of field is way too blurry, even though fstop is set to 127.999
Next, I created render layers to separate the foreground from the background, to fix the volumetric defocus:
As you can see, the results are much better, and I like that the smoke is more visible, but problems 2 and 3 still occur.
Next, I completely deselected the background layers from the scene, and simply rendered the foreground:
As you can see, now problem 2 is fixed, as the borders of the smoke domain do not render. I can render the background animation, and then the foreground animation, and composite them later, and that should fix the smoke domain’s borders, but I am left with one final problem, the blurriness of the defocus node.
Like I said, the fstop is set as high as it can go without being disabled: 127.999, and yet the blurriness is crazy. Obviously the zbuffer is working properly as the foreground object is still in focus, but the background is just ridiculously blurry. Also, decreasing fstop does make it even blurrier. I suppose I could work around this by decreasing the maximum blur, but I’m wondering why it’s doing this when I’ve seen people’s renders that have fstops quite low and still aren’t anywhere near as blurry as mine. Are there settings I may be overlooking? Here are my defocus settings:
Thanks for your help!
btw don’t worry about the quality of the objects or materials, I’m still going to tweak them later.