Come learn the art of 3D computer generated art and animation. This blog deals with the lessons learned and the art created by Robert G. Male using DazStudio from Daz3D.
Also covered are the ancillary software, tools, techniques, and processes needed both before and after rending in the 3D software.
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To give a camera-like look to your pictures in DazStudio you want to add depth of field and perspective. By default the Default Camera has Perspective set to On. Below that setting is Depth of Field. For these images you want to turn the Depth of Field to On. That is only part of the process though. All cameras have the setting Point At. You need to have something for the camera to point at to use the depth of field. To do this put a Null in the scene and tell the camera to point at that. Place your null before altering the camera angles or they will change suddenly. The null should be placed where you want the focus of the scene to be. That focus will be as clear as if you had done nothing, but items further back, and background structures, will be out of focus just like in a photo. The null can be buried in a figure, behind it, or in front of it, depending on just how sharp you want the focus to be on the subject. Everything else will blur naturally.
In DazStudio 3.x and lower the amount of blurriness can be pretty intense so I actually suggest taking the value next to Point At, which will be 1.00 and setting it to 0 or even -0.1 (though going further negative doesn’t sharpen the background any). In the new DazStudio 4.x I found the value to be semi-locked and could only change it by digging into the parameters, and then it appeared to make no difference to the focus anyway.
There is one immediate problem when pointing the camera at the null. The scene will shift and your camera angle will be different than it was. Also the controls to change the angles work different because the camera continues to point at the null and what you are doing is, to your perspective, moving the scene around until it looks like you want it to look. You may also need to put your null lower than the face of your figure if you want to see more of the figure's lower portions. Then there are the other controls involved with the camera for depth of field.
There is Focal Distance, which allows you to move the point of focus in the same manner as moving the null closer and further to the camera--to me there’s no point in using that control since the null can affect the focus in all three dimensions. If you do use it, Focal Distance short of the figure gives the figure some blur, beyond it the same, though with beyond more of the location behind the figure should be clearer, but that's likely to be just the floor unless there are other objects. There is also F/Stop, which in a physical camera controls the amount of light coming in. That affects the depth of field, or how sharp a focus the picture has away from the object or position that is fully in focus. It has the most effect in DazStudio 4.x, as best as I can tell, and will be the go-to control in there for how much blur there is. All in all Daz's un-focus is grainy and not very natural, but a softness pass in postproduction might alleviate that some.
The Daz depth controls aren’t useful if you want to focus on a figure that is close to inline with important parts of the background items/sets. In such cases it can be better to use a postproduction technique as I did in the Killing Time Cover 3-4. That is done by using a selection tool to select your figure, as close to their skin/clothes as you can--though I selected the figure’s shadow as well--and adding blur to the rest of the image as desired. That method though makes everything out of focus the same amount of blurry. As in a photo it should get progressively more out of focus as you move away from the in-focus object to as badly blurred as it will get, which wouldn't be to the point of being a coloured smear unless your photo was really large. Since I switched to the new PaintShop Photo Pro X3 I have access to a Depth of Field control panel, which I will discuss some other time.
