Relax. (Plus a Cycles tutorial!)

Here’s a quick post, just showing some artwork I did recently, accompanied by a (very) short tutorial on, well, I’ll let you see when you get there 🙂

Relax. (click to enlarge)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Cycles: 1,000 passes)

I’m calling the rendering “Relax.” for reasons that should be rather obvious. So, now, stop relaxing, and follow this tutorial! 😛

Depth of Field in Cycles:

At last, you can get nice Depth Of Field without having to run your scene through some compositor! Ok, so this already may be obvious to you, but start by going into the camera. Under it’s settings you should find something that says (obviously) “Depth of Field”. You now have settings that allow you to do several things, as shown below (note: the settings below are not the default settings):

So, for settings you have one of two options for focus, you can manually set the distance (I would recommend checking the box that says ‘limits’ under ‘display’ if you are going to do this) or you could choose an object for your camera to focus on, I would recommend using the latter if your situation allows you to. you also have  ‘size’ under aperture, which I think is basically the bluriness, you should play around with that one a lot until you get something you like. The other option involves ‘bokeh’. You may have seen this in pictures, when you look and there’s something bright in the background, but also blurred out, like sparkling water. you get this effect that looks like a bunch of octagons, hexagons, or circles, etc. Pretty cool looking. The ‘blades’ sets the number of sides. The rotation is the rotation of the blades. So what’s so cool about the cycles depth of field? do the settings, hit render and there you go! It renders it with depth of field! you no longer have to go into the compositor to get DoF in Blender! 😀

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this small tutorial, and I hope you learned something! If you have any questions, thoughts, or if I missed something, feel free to leave a comment!

-Stopsecret Design