Junior Mr. X FX Artist Tyler Britton shares some insights into the development of his Nuke Gizmo that will handle adjusting depth of field. A Nuke Gizmo that will handle depth of field in itself, is not very noteworthy. Tyler’s tool however, will take transparent or semi-transparent surfaces into account.
When one wants to incorporated depth of field in their scene using a z depth pass, it does not take into account transparent or semi-transparent surfaces through the shaders in the scene
If you are creating depth of field in the composite through a Z Depth pass, typical tools won’t take into account transparent or semi-transparent surfaces through the shaders in the scene.
Tyler notes that this can be a big problem because transparent surfaces should technically be handled differently in the comp than solid surfaces. For example, if a camera is focused on a foreground glass object, then background objects that are seen through the glass should be somewhat out of focus.
Tyler’s Depth of Field Nuke Gizmo lets you add values to image channel isolated by user selected masks. In practical terms, you can manually add depth values for transparent surfaces in the shot.
The Nuke Gizmo also lets you set which masks that you would like to use as well as what image channel to display, without having to dive into the Gizmo itself.
Tyler Britton goes through his setup in great detail, showing his process as well as offering some examples for compositing depth of field with transparent objects using the Nuke Gizmo. You can also download the Nuke Gizmo for DOF here.
