This may not be the correct category for this post, as I understand that having true to life optics is heavily dependent on having the correct material setup. But, let’s say I have my materials and modeling as physically correct as Blender/cycles allows and I want to take it further with the render…

I think I had seen the same post at some point, but couldn’t find it. That’s one of the reasons I made this post, hoping someone would have a link. all of that said, say I hypothetically get the stuff modeled out and was at the rendering stage. do you have any tips for the multiple types of passes …

I suspect not. I can’t think of any way to get passes out of it. Even when trying to use ray-info(light path node) from the lenses material I expect there to be problems, but may be worth investigating perhaps?

I’m definitely going to try today. My wife is currently using my computer to play WOW, so I’m just trying to get some research done before I hop in and get decision paralysis. thanks for you thoughtful replies!

Might be a useful page: [image] The Cycles Input Encyclopedia — Blender Guru Sometimes the User Manual is too technical and doesn't explain things in a way that us artists can easily understand. That's why we've taken it upon ourselves to write these posts and explain Cycles, with its …

Ooh, this is good for referencing in general! thanks a ton!

Looking over it quick though, I do have my doubts strengthened further though. Might be easier to try and use some compositor work perhaps.

that’s what I’m thinking. I know I can just move the camera with the arrow keys to nudge it for the Hasselblad effect I mentioned. but beyond that, I may just have to composite out individual instances of a single render.

Pretty sure there are some commercial addons that do it for you though. If you need this for work then it might be worth investing in one of those perhaps?

this is all just some rabbit hole that I’m exploring for fun. I’ll look at the market though and see what comes up.

Well, Lux has better light transport algorithms which is what you need to simulate lenses. the other software I can think of is using Maxwell Render or appleseed’s SPPM integrator

Simulating real camera/lens optics in cycles

Artistic Support Lighting and Rendering

zeealpal (zeealpal) June 9, 2020, 11:48pm 24

There’s a nice example here by Fox on the LuxCore Forum:

https://forums.luxcorerender.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1049#p12086

And I don’t know if you’ve read through this thread either: