Change point of focus in an animation with low F-Stop

[CADMonkey]

Hi all,

I really fancy doing a little animation using depth of field.

I'd like to use an F-stop of 1.4 /2.8 to get very shallow DoF.

Focus on something in the foreground then shift focus to the background over say 60 frames.

Is this possible with Skindigo?

Here is a video which uses the effect.. (The second cut with the apple)
http://www.theheron.co.uk/the-apartments/island-suite

[galinette]

I don't think that focus animation is implemented.

However, I thought of a workaround once : set autofocus, and animate a null-material object in the camera axis. I did not test this and maybe this doesn't work, if indigo autofocus ignores the null material.


Etienne

[CADMonkey]

Hey Etienne,

Thanks for the input.

I think you are correct (if anyone would know, it's you!).

I have an idea how to do it by hacking the IGS file. I'm thinking of creating 60 IGS files (1 for each frame) and then manually adjusting the focus point XYZ.

It's a tad long winded but hopefully will work.

I've started making a spreadsheet to calculate the XYZ co ordinates for each frame..i'll post the results if I get it working

[galinette]

Hey Etienne,

Thanks for the input.

I think you are correct (if anyone would know, it's you!).

I have an idea how to do it by hacking the IGS file. I'm thinking of creating 60 IGS files (1 for each frame) and then manually adjusting the focus point XYZ.

It's a tad long winded but hopefully will work.

I've started making a spreadsheet to calculate the XYZ co ordinates for each frame..i'll post the results if I get it working

I was not daring to give this as a solution, but I've done several animations by scripting the igs. Manual editing will take some time, you should try to use a script language for this! In your script, you just need to open the igs, find the <focus_distance> string, then insert the distance and save the file with a frame number added at the end of the file name. That's a very short script in Python for instance.

The only time I made a spreadsheet for computing cameras and modify by hand was for doing stereo 3D images (just 2 igs to do). For an animation scripting will save you some time in the future...