Getting Great Depth of Field in Cinema 4D with Nuke

Music : [intro music]
Joey Korenman : Hey there, Joey here for school emotion. And in this lesson, we are going to take a look at how to create depth of field in your 3d renders. This is a very important technique to know for adding realism to your composites. We'll take a look at the pros and cons of two different ways of achieving this effect by baking the depth of field into your render and by rendering out a separate pass that you can use in your favorite compositing software, don't forget to sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files from this lesson, as well as assets from any other lesson on school emotion. And now let's jump in. So here we are in cinema and I have just set up a really, really simple scene, um, with these nine objects kind of arranged in a grid. Um, and, uh, I did that just so we had something to, uh, you know, something that could be the foreground and the background, and be easy to show you guys, um, depth of field.
Joey Korenman : So if we, uh, if we look at this render here through the editor camera, um, you can see there's no depth of field. It looks very synthetic, very CG. Uh, so, uh, a lot of times to help with that, we, uh, we use depth of field and if you're not completely familiar with depth of field, um, that the field is that effect you get, when a, you take a picture with a camera, for example, and you're focused on something far away, but in between you and your subject, there's something close to the camera and that thing gets blurry. Um, it it's, it goes out of focus. So that's depth of field and what depth the field, what the words, depth the field, uh, are referring to are actually the region, uh, that is in focus in your image. Um, so if you have, uh, a very narrow, um, a very narrow piece of your image, that's in focus, that's called having shallow depth of field.
Joey Korenman : Um, and, and a lot of people try to go for that effect because it's cool looking and it, it, it can, you know, make things look like a you're really, really close to them, or they're really, really small, and you can get a lot of neat effects. So anyway, um, to get depth of field, uh, from cinema, um, the first way I'm going to show you guys is to create a depth pass and then composite with that. Um, so, uh, the first thing you need to do to create a depth fast is enable multipass rendering and enable the depth channel. Um, and I've already done that here, but I'm going to erase this and just show you guys. So, um, I went to my render settings and, uh, I made sure multipass is checked. Um, and what I'm going to do really quickly is I'm going to, uh, go into my saved settings and I'm going to, uh, erase the file name here so that I can use my picture viewer, but not actually save a file on that's a trick I like to use a lot.
Joey Korenman : Um, so then we have our multipass checks, that's enabled, and, uh, we're going to click on the multipass tab, go down here and add the depth channel. So now when you render a, you're seeing you're going to get a depth pass now, um, let's add a camera. All right. And, um, a lot of times, if you don't know a lot about photography or cinematography, and I don't know that much, but, um, I have some experience with it and I find it helpful because, um, it's easy to overdo it with depth of field and add too much just because it looks neat. Um, but if you're trying to make things look real or maybe not look real, but feel like they were shot, um, then you don't want to overdo it. And you want to have a sense of what's the appropriate amount of, of blur to have on your image.