Camera Tips and Trick in Blender

so I quickly put together this scene yesterday and I think it turned out pretty bad pretty below average if you ask me and there I turned on the depth of field checkbox and look at it now it looks so much better and I know what you're thinking yep the field I know what depth of field is I know everything there is to know about depth of field is this what this video is going to be all about screw this guy but hold on hear me out I felt I knew everything there is to know about depth of field as well but there's more to it you can completely change the way your Enders look if used properly so let me try and take you through it in case you didn't know depth of field is just a simple way of saying what part of the image is in Focus if it's a very small part of the image that's in Focus the image is said to have a shallow depth of field you usually see it in portrait shots or Wildlife photography where you want to isolate the subject wrong background and if a large part of the photograph is in focus it is said to have a large or wide depth of field like you usually see in a landscape photograph since you want everything to be increased and clear Focus or in layman terms it just means how blurry the background of the photo is that's it right and you can control that with three things which is Aperture focal length and distance from the subject so first aperture it is really confusing to a lot of people it was for me for sure but it's quite simple once you understand it so let me try and explain it to you in simple terms what it means so every camera has an aperture or hole through is the light from The Real World enters the camera right to take a picture and this hole can have different sizes your camera has that functionality you can make it wide open or you can make it absolutely tiny now the size of this hole is represented by a number called the f-stop and this is where it gets confusing because when the hole is in its widest State you'd expect this number that represents this hole should also be high but that's not the case like when the hole is in this wide open state it is said to have an f-stop of 2.8 and when it has this extremely small opening it is said to have an F stop of 20 which is confusing but f-stop actually controls the depth of field in an image remember to screw the size of this hole screw whatever this aperture thing is just look at it like this imagine there are infinite F's ranging out from your camera lens so f-stop just represents how many F's in this series are in Focus if it's F 2.8 only 2.8 of the F's are in Focus if it's F20 20 of the F's are in Focus that's it that's all you need to know about aperture or f-stop for now then comes focal and I won't go too deep into what it is and how it works just know that a 25 millimeter focal length is gonna give you less blur and 100 millimeter focal length is going to give you more blur but don't describe hang it up when you need more blur small 25 millimeter focal length makes your image pointy and stretched out like how you usually want in a wide shutter landscape or something like that and a high 100 millimeter focal length makes the image nice and flat like you usually see in a portrait chart so yeah that's f-stop and focal length to control the depth of field in an image now last is distance from the subject which is pretty self-explanatory if you're closer to the subject you're gonna get more blur and if you keep going farther away the blur gets slower I think anyone owning a smartphone has seen this distance thing in effect live in front of them so I'll leave it at that and that's it that's how you control the depth of field in an image but then what about these other fields I see in the depth of field section in the blender but let's check them out as well versus distance this field is just set a focal point for the camera basically how far the point of focus is from the camera what I would suggest is you turn on this limits checkbox under the viewport display panel in the camera properties Tab and then you see this Crosshair that represents the point of focus that is controlled by this distance field you can also just grab it with your mouse and move it like that but what I think is the best way to choose the point of focus is going under the material view while depth of field is enabled and just change the distance till you see the subject in Focus I've seen several people trying to find the focal point in the rendered view which is not efficient at all so just do it in the material view instead it's much faster and responsive relatively especially if you have a computer like me so do that and what a lot of people also like to do is use this eyedropper thing to select what object they want and focus or just type the name of the object they want in focus to save time and also you don't have to worry about the distance field anymore the focal point goes where the object goes the only issue when you do that is the camera tries to focus on the origin point of the object say if you have a very shallow depth of field that can be problematic because the origin isn't in the right place the focus point will end up in a weird place and your final render will be out of focus there are two ways to fix that first if you press n to open up the side panel then go to the tools Tab and check the effect only Origins checkbox under the transform tab what you can then do is select the move tool from the T panel and then you can just move the origin point where you want the focus to be but that's too tedious so people usually prefer the second way that is just spawn and empty into the scene and choose that as the focus object and just place that wherever you want the focus to be that's a simpler way to do it do that don't do the first thing it's stupid then comes up stop which again Lower the number let's set the plane of focus and more the blur in your picture now the last three options are pretty interesting as well they control the shape and style of the bokeh which usually refers to these out of focus balls of light you see in a lot of renders the shape and style of that bokeh can be a huge character in your scene if you have a shallow depth of field going on in your render so let's take a closer look at these settings first is the blades option remember we talked about aperture which is how big the hole is on the edge of the lens so that light can actually enter the lens now the size of this hole is dependent on these flaps you see on camera lenses you set your f-stop to 2.8 and the flaps expand to reveal the lens and if you set it to something like 5.6 then they contract to form this tinier hole If You observe closely the flaps are all expanded and the hole is almost fully open the edges of the flaps make a circular shape and hence the shape of the bokeh is also circular when you close this hole down a bit see how it takes the sectional shape when you take a picture in this state the shape of the bokeh will be hexagonal so it all depends on how many flaps or blades this aperture apparatus has and that's what this Blade's field is in blend like you see in this example three blades forms a triangle you increase it to something like four and it becomes a square and so on and so forth it's a great storytelling tool if you know how different shapes generate different feelings and emotions with the Nunes you can use this slider to your story's Merit then then comes the rotation field which just controls the rotation of these Poke Balls Like You see here in the Triangle bokeh I change the rotation to 45 degrees and the triangle rotates according to that finally the ratio field which is also a very interesting effect if you hover over that field it says Distortion to simulate anamorphic lens bokeh we'll talk more about anamorphic lenses in just a minute but let me just quickly show you what this ratio field does as you can see it just stretches out the triangle bouquet in the background basically it distorts it in a way you can enter a value of 0.5 to squish it down or a value of 3 to stretch it out like this and that's it these are the three fields to manipulate the shape and size and the style of the bouquet in your image and look at this image closely and then this image taken with the real camera with some bokeh on it you see some difference you see how the bokeh has this weird strange and chromatic aberration and some dots and Noise Within the book itself and the blender bokeh is just plain and clean but that's because blender doesn't really have optically correct bokeh because it's mathematical it's a software emulation of a real world camera so it yields almost perfect results while in a real world camera you have a lot of things affecting the lens in the sensor in your camera dust and wear and tear and chromatic aberration all that sort of stuff that affects the style and shape of the bouquet but for the purposes of this video we just have to know blend as default bokeh isn't optically correct which is fine you know you won't even be able to tell the difference if I didn't mention it explicitly or unless you're an absolute bokeh fiend and you know how it's exactly supposed to work but not if you just look at it or show it to someone who's not a photographer but still an error is still an error so what do we do should we wait for the devs to add this functionality in the future in chart yes unless you want to spend some money to fix it and that's where these two awesome paid add-ons come in first is the prevalence 2 add-on by our beloved William Landrum it fixes a lot of the problems that I just mentioned here's a comparison of a render with the add-on and without the add-on the image looks way more realistic and optically correct and a bit more stylish too feels like it has a lot more character now weirdly so get that add-on if you want optically correct bouquet it's a relatively affordable plugin and it's a great bang for your buck link will be in the description it is another costlier add-on which also does the same thing but has a lot more options for you that would be the cam effects add-on by B production if you have 30 dollars to spare this has a little more options you can add different kinds of stylistic bouquet effects some with noise and dust effects built into them which is great along with that you also have lens dirt effects which is another great way to add even more realism in your scene people usually add them in post in Photoshop with this add-on you can do it within blender here are some test renders using this add-on and I guess that's all I had to say about bokeh now for some final tips follow real world skill you have to design everything to scale otherwise the whole depth of field thing will fall apart if you make a toy car the size of a mountain the camera is going to treat it like a mountain and generate depth of field based on that scale so scale everything very carefully second is to think like a real photographer and treat the blender camera like a real camera place the camera in the scene where it makes sense like you cannot paste the camera here below the ground level to take this shot of the mushrooms or like super close to the owl the owl will probably kill you and fly off place it where it will make sense where you'd place a real world Cam and also use regular camera metrics for focal length and f-stop don't just use a 5 000 millimeter focal length try and look up camera specifications and what kind of camera and lens should be used in a scene like yours last thing to note this video is just for the perspective lens type there's also the orthographic and the panoramic lens type which are a bit different and a little out of scope for this video so just know we were talking about the perspective lens type in this video and not the other one anamorphic lenses are actually emulated within blender using the panoramic lens type in conjunction with the ratio field I showed you earlier I will link one video in the description below if you're looking to make something like this in the future but that's it for this video depth of field is not just for looks and not just for style it can be a very strong tool for your story it is one of the major ways artists use to guide the attention of the viewer to the subject of the scene to use it abuse it here it's great like I made these four renders in literally one day I obviously used a bunch of third-party assets which will be linked in the description but still my point was to show the power of depth of field and what you can do with it in just a matter of hours if I can make these four renders in a single day imagine what you can do with more time and effort but yeah that's it for this video share your thoughts in the comment section below correct me in case I said something wrong and please let me know which one of these four Enders looks the best from a thumbnail perspective that always helps so please do that alright that's it video's done I'll see you guys in the next one bye

Channel: stache

Views: 11,897

Keywords: depth of field in blender, bokeh in blender, depth of field tutorial blender, dof blender, blender dof tutorial, aperture in blender, focal length in blender, bokeh tutorial in blender, pro lens 2 addon blender, camfx addon in blender, pro lens 2 william landgren, william landgren blender, bproductions blender, camera addon blender, bokeh addon blender, pro lens addon blender, blender addons, camera addons for blender, camfx blender, pro lens 2 blender, blender, blenders, 3d

Id: iq6Nm6NJM8M

Length: 10min 24sec (624 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 28 2022