#dof troubleshooting

[pictureamoebae]

hi! i'm having an issue with reshade and i was sorta hoping you could help me out. i posted a pic on my blog of the problem /post/184883026262 !

I’m assuming this is your first time using dof? 

First of all, follow this tutorial to set up the depth buffer correctly.

Out of the box dof is usually set up to use auto-focus (and from what I can gather a lot of preset makers leave it like that). When you scroll down to the dof shader in the bottom pane is auto-focus turned on? And is mouse-driven auto-focus also turned on? If yes, then the camera will focus wherever you position your mouse in the game, and whatever is at that point will be in focus.

You can get finer control by turning auto-focus off and using manual focus, but if this is your first time using dof, and as long as you don’t hotsample using srwe, you’re probably best leaving it set to auto-focus.

You can adjust how sharply/softly the blurry areas appear with the far plane and near plane settings. Far plane affects everything further away into the distance than whatever is in focus, and near plane affects everything closer to you than whatever is in focus.

You can adjust the strength of the blur using the blur radius setting. Lower numbers mean less blur, and higher numbers mean more blur.

That covers the basics. If you want to change things relating to how the blur/bokeh looks you need to scroll down and use some of the other settings, but I recommend leaving that for now until you’re more familiar with using dof as it’s already set up.

If you have any more questions, please let me know and I’ll do my best to help answer them.

[pictureamoebae]

Hello! I hope you're doing well and I'm looking forward to seeing further progress on your new reshade preset - I'm super excited for it! I was wondering - for the quint_dof shaders, do you know if there's any way to make them have mouse-driven focus? I love the quint_dof but it's frustrating that I always have to have my subject in the center of the screen or I have to manually change the focusing point if I want to have my screenshot be off-center. Do you have any advice or tips? Thank you!!

It looks like he still hasn’t added mouse-driven af into the qUINT version (someone asked for it to be included and he said he might, but...) so it won’t be possible.

I use manual focusing, which I find it be easier than auto-focus (without it being mouse-driven). 

With manual focusing what you’re doing is setting the focus plane, rather than a spot in the centre (or wherever) of the screen at which to determine the focus point. It means that if you manually set the focus plane to be at a distance of 0.4 it will always be at that distance, regardless of what gets in the way.

You do still have to change that focus plane distance a lot, but I find it less annoying and more precise than using the auto-focus coordinates. 

If I am taking a lot of portraits or gameplay scene shots I often find I keep it at between 0.1 and 0.4, but for landscape shots where I want just a little blur in the far distance I will sometimes crank it up higher, in conjunction with the far plane blur value.

Once you’re used to using manual focus it doesn’t take much time at all. It’s certainly a lot quicker than trying to work out where your coordinates should be each time you move the camera.

[pictureamoebae]

DoF Focus

I saw a post in my feed just about someone having problems with focusing DoF in ReShade. They’ve deleted their post now because they found an answer, but I’d written a reply so I figured it useful to share. It won’t make perfect sense because it was relating specifically to pictures they’d posted, but you should be able to follow the gist of it.

Summary of the problem: when the camera was pointing at a sim’s chest the background would be blurred, but when the camera was moved up to the sim’s face the background would be in focus and the blur was lost.

Okay so what you need to sort out is the focus. What’s happening is the point at which ReShade is looking for the focus changes as you move the camera.

For example, if you have non-mouse-driven auto-focus enabled and you have it set at screen coordinates 0.5, 0.5 that means whatever is directly in the centre of the screen will always be in focus, and whatever falls behind that (behind in terms of depth) point will be blurred.

So, his chest is quite a large target, and his face is a smaller target. Depending on where you have focus set to, it sounds like it could be just missing his face. The focus coordinates are falling on the background instead, meaning the background will be sharp and in focus.

A more specific example using your pictures: if the focus coordinates are set to 0.2, 0.4 then in the first picture that point falls around his right shoulder, meaning that’s the focus point and anything behind it will be blurred. But when you move the camera so his face is in view, 0.2, 0.4 now falls on the background, not on his face (the middle of his face would be something like 0.4, 0.6 - looking carefully, 0.5, 0.5 (which is default) might just be missing his neck at the place where it curves in).

You often have to experiment with different coordinates on a per-shot basis to get the right focus depending on where your subject is. You can enable mouse-driven auto-focus to make this a lot easier. As the name suggests, anywhere you point your mouse will be the subject of focus.

Personally I use manual focus and set the distances more accurately that way. It doesn’t rely on knowing the x, y coordinates of your subject, and only takes depth into consideration. (I can’t use mouse-driven auto-focus because I hotsample, but that’s by-the-by.)