In this short video tutorial, I'm going to talk about the Center Focus Depth of Field add-on.
Video Transcript
Hello everyone! In this short video tutorial, I'm going to talk about the Center Focus Depth of Field add-on. It's a small add-on for Blender that automatically updates the Focus Distance of the active camera based on the point at the center of the frame. You can find the link to the add-on in the description of this video.
You just need to enable the automatic option, and the Focus Distance field will always be synchronized in real time with whatever is in front of the active camera.
There's also a Smooth Transition option available, which allows the Focus Distance value to change more gradually when it updates, helping you achieve smoother transitions.
This add-on and its options can be easily enabled or disabled in its dedicated panel, located within the Object Data tab of the Camera object.
Now I’ll show you a practical example of how to use it, starting from a scene where Depth of Field has not been enabled either in the Viewport or in the Camera object settings.
First, I enable the Depth of Field display in the 3D Viewport by checking the corresponding box in the Viewport Shading menu.
I then select the virtual camera. Inside its Object Data tab in the Properties Editor, I enable the Depth of Field option.
At this point, since the add-on hasn't been activated yet, I'm manually choosing a scene object as the focus point.
The depth of field is determined by the value of the F Stop parameter. The lower this value is, the shallower the depth of field will be. I'm setting an extremely low F Stop value to exaggerate the effect and make it more noticeable in this preview.
Now I'm removing the object that was set as the Focus Object. I had assigned it just to get an initial value for the Depth of Field, but in fact, there shouldn't be any Focus Object if you want to use the add-on, since it will control the Focus Distance parameter.
I then install and enable the add-on, which is also provided as an extension, in the Preferences panel.
The add-on's panel will appear as a new section within the Object Data tab of the Camera object, in the Properties Editor.
Here, we can choose whether to let the add-on automatically update the Focus Distance parameter by enabling the Auto Update DOF Distance option, or disable this option and click the Update DOF Distance Manually button whenever we want to update the Focus Distance value. This can be useful if, for example, you want to use the add-on just to calculate and lock the focus distance, without having it change every time the framing or the objects in the scene change.
The Smooth Transition option, when enabled, provides a slightly more gradual change between different Focus Distance values as the distance of the point at the center of the frame changes. If this option is disabled, the value changes instantly, which can be a bit jarring when switching from a very close object to one that’s far away. I’ll show you a few examples using a walkthrough of the scene, made with the Walk Navigation mode.
As you may have noticed, the add-on does not modify the F Stop parameter based on the size of the objects in the frame. It only updates the focus distance. Here, I used a very low F Stop value to exaggerate the effect for demonstration purposes, but choosing the right value, which can also be animated, depends on your specific needs.
The central point of the frame can be easily identified in the Viewport thanks to the visible guidelines activated via the Composition Guides group. For example, you can use the Center option in the Viewport Display Composition Guides section of the Camera object.
If there are no objects at the center of the virtual camera, meaning we're pointing at the virtual universe, the Focus Distance value is automatically set to 10000. This is a value chosen to simulate a very large distance.
Alright, that’s it for this short video tutorial! Unlike most of my other tutorials, a PDF version of this one is not currently available for download. However, you'll find a link in the description to a page that contains PDF versions of many of my other tutorials. In any case, this is a great time to subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications! See you soon!