evasion | 3D

Key Benefits

Depth-of-Field accounts for photo-realism. It is the feature of the real-world optics, and must be approached as serious as lighting, modeling or texturing.

Depth-of-Field is the key element in photographic composition. Together with other camera settings, DOF is a powerful expression tool, that helps you better define the foreground and background. It is the key to achieving great composition and beautiful images.

Especially in CG, the DOF effect can save you a lot of work. Instead of modeling and texturing everything carefully, you will just put all effort into important areas - objects in focus. As a result, you will get cooler pictures in shorter time!

Feature Highlights

Smooth, Fast and Accurate Depth-Of-Field effect

Custom Lens Diaphragms

Custom Intensity Features

Advanced Motion Blur

Beauty, Speed, and Accuracy

All of it can work at the same time! The other DOF solutions either lack accuracy - the case of post-filters, or take hours to render, as it happens with all raytraced DOFs. Here is a comparison between X-Dof, and MR native depth of field.

Custom Lens Diaphragms

The lens aperture of a real camera consists of a number of blades which add up for an opening through which the light hits the film. X-Dof allows to simulate the diaphragms with 3,4,5,6,8,10 or 12 sides, with the option to scale and rotate. Furthermore, it allows for edge smoothing, which absolutely matches the shape of a real aperture, blades of which are not straight but round.

Custom Pixel Intensity

The effect of various diaphragms can best be seen on luminous pixels. The custom intensity features allow for boosting the RGB values, either based on specular shading, luminosity, special intensity buffer, or through the render-engine directly, based on the HDR pixel values. The result can be modified by custom color filters.

Advanced Motion Blur

Using X-Dof, users can achieve complex optical phenomenon, that includes motion blur and depth-of-field simulated at the same time. X-Dof's precise processing, which can account for the DOF effect alone, ensures an optimal allocation of sampling passes, for the motion blur and depth-of-field simulation.

Implementation

X-Dof consists of the xdof_lens and xdof_output shaders

Seamless integration within the Mental Ray environment

Seamless workflow inside Maya and SOFTIMAGE|XSI, including interactive rendering

Limitations

The xdof_output shader doesn't process pixels seen through transparent surfaces. A correct circle-of-confusion on such surfaces can still be accomplished via xdof_lens, or by rendering and processing the scene in separate layers.

Maya 5.x, 6.0
WinNT, Win2000, WinXP
At least 128mb ram recommended

SOFTIMAGE|XSI 4.x
WinNT, Win2000, WinXP
At least 128mb ram recommended

Mental Ray Standalone 3.3
WinNT, Win2000, WinXP
At least 128mb ram recommended