Post Depth Of Field Versus Rendered Depth Of Field Comparisons in Nuke

EarlyWormCG with a post that takes a look at using “post” blur effects in Nuke using a depth map and compares that to actually rendering depth of field in the rendering engine.

What is interesting is that the post goes into describing both image quality and rendering times, and surprisingly, it would seen that with really large z-depth files it almost seems better to just create the blur in-render.

large ZBlur’s within Nuke can take a heck of a long time to render. In fact depending on your scene and your renderer it’s often quicker to render DOF in 3d than it is to apply it as a post process in 2d.

EarlyWorm was using 3Dlight for rendering and notably shows the post render effect breaking down in comparison to the much more accurate in-render effect.

In the end the Rendered DOF seemed faster than the post DOF in Nuke, and certainly the quality did suffer looking at the image comparisons, and EarlyWorm notes that depending on your scene and your renderer it’s often quicker to render DOF in 3d than it is to apply it as a post process in 2d.

Check out the post for Post DOF vs Rendered DOF and comparisons here.