Depth of Field

The effect descriptions on this page refer to the default effects found within the post-processing stack.

Depth of Field is a common post-processing effect that simulates the focus properties of a camera lens. In real life, a camera can only focus sharply on an object at a specific distance; objects nearer or farther from the camera will be somewhat out of focus. The blurring not only gives a visual cue about an object’s distance but also introduces Bokeh which is the term for pleasing visual artifacts that appear around bright areas of the image as they fall out of focus.

An example of Depth of Field effect can be seen in the following images, displaying the results of a focused midground but a defocused background and foreground.

Properties

Property:	Function:
Focus Distance	Distance to the point of focus.
Aperture	Ratio of the aperture (known as f-stop or f-number). The smaller the value is, the shallower the depth of field is.
Focal Length	Distance between the lens and the film. The larger the value is, the shallower the depth of field is.
Use Camera FOV	Calculate the focal length automatically from the field-of-view value set on the camera.
Kernel Size	Convolution kernel size of the bokeh filter, which determines the maximum radius of bokeh. It also affects the performance (the larger the kernel is, the longer the GPU time is required).

Optimisation

• Reduce Kernel Size

Requirements

• Depth texture

• Shader model 3

See the Graphics Hardware Capabilities and Emulation page for further details and a list of compliant hardware.

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• 2017–05–24 Page published with no editorial review

• New feature in 5.6