Date: Sun, 21 Jun 1998 23:27:19 +0400 From: ATREJ NETWORK Subject: [IML] IFW: DOF question ? Hi, First I would like to thank everyone that answered my previous question - I got some very useful input and some other tips that I would have never thought of. I'm trying to do a space scene, my problem is that I have some large ships in the background and I have smaller fighter ship closer to the camera - everything is fine except that when I render the larger ships loose that feel of being so big. I was thinking of using DOF to give my work some depth ?? Is this the correct way of doing so ? if it is then where can I find some help on DOF ? ---------------------------------- Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1998 20:43:30 +0200 From: Conny Joensson The April "Digestive IML" has two (very good) articles about Depth of = Field. You'll find the archive at my homepage -> 3D -> Imagine -> = Digestive IML -> April 1998. I'm using knowledge from these articles to improve on my contest = submission. :) ---------------------------------- Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1998 11:55:28 -0700 From: Rhithyn Yr Arth At 11:27 PM 6/21/98 +0400, you wrote: >I'm trying to do a space scene, my problem is that I have some large ships ... >help on DOF ? Well, here's my two cents: DOF is great for making a focused object look small, not making a distant object look big. e.g.: you would notice the DOF effect if you took a picture of a flower, and the rest of the plant gradually blurred out with distance. You know the flower is small, because of how quickly the rest of the background loses focus. Fog is great for making a background object look big. A gradual "fade-out" of the object (to a pale cyan on earth around noon, to maybe a black for night or space), especially if the object shows the gradual fade across it's surface. Making the texture detail and adding many tiny spots (like lights) would make the object seem much larger than it is. e.g.: You know mountains are huge, because they fade into the skyline. They're clear, but lose detail due to the "haze" of the atmosphere. A city seems huge due to the fading into the haze as well as (especially at night) you notice the sheer number of tiny lights distributed all over the surface, and in the day, by the tiny details you see from far away. Adding a crumple or other bump-texture with a tiny size will give some surface randomness (at the cost of rendering time) to make the object seem more detailed than it may already be. Also using one of the windows textures with tiny window sizes and low number of windows may give the ship more mass. Perfect Example: In Star Wars, you know the Imperial Battle Cruisers are huuuge because of the tiny details along the edges and the almost microscopic lights along the edges, in the bridge, etc. We seem to automatically assume that the tiny lights are the size of a regular house windows or the size of street-lights, and that changes the scale significantly. Personally, using DOF to blur out the BG will only help in making your fighter seem tiny, and not really affect the scale of your huge ships. Hope this helps ---------------------------------- Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 22:11:03 +0400 From: Charles Blaquiere That's very perceptive of you, Rhithyn. Anything that can have a recognizable size, will give a sense of scale to the scene. ----------------------------------