Focus

Focus Plane and Depth of Field Limits

When the Focus Plane is active, you have the possibility to previous the area that will be in perceived as sharp using the Depth of Field Limits.
You can choose between Cylinder Wire or Shaded display.

You will also be able to preview the Hyperfocal Distance corresponding to that Focal Length and Aperture. The Hyperfocal Distance is the Focus distance that will maximize the Depth of Field, meaning that it will bring most of your scene into focus, including objects placed at "infinity".

Autofocus Tools

AF-S (Autofocus Single): Starts a picker that allows you pick the surface of an object in the viewport to set the Focus distance value.

AF-Track (Autofocus Track): Starts a picker that allows you pick the surface of an object to create an empty in that location, parented to the object you cleaned on. This empty will then be used as a Camera Focus Object. This can be used to easily pick the eye of a character, and make sure it stays in focus during the animation.

Enable AF-C (Autofocus Continuous): Sends a ray from the center of the camera frame and set the Focus distance when hitting an object surface. Requires to look through the camera.
The ray interval can be lowered to make the AF update faster (by default, the ray is sent every 0.6 seconds).
Important: At the moment, this only works in the 3D View and not during renders. It is meant to be used with the Animate AF button, to easily create Focus distance animation.

Animate AF is a toggle option.
When enabled and using with with the AF-S operator, it will set a key on the focus distance any time you pick the surface you want to focus on in the viewport. This way, you can change the current frame in the timeline and set your Focus distance keys at different time.

When enabled with AF-C, it will set keys at the interval set just above. The workflow for the best experience is this:

- Animate your camera transform to your liking.

- Look through the camera in the 3D view.

- Turn on AF-C

- Turn on Animate AF

- Play the timeline until the end and stop it (it used to stop automatically and now it loops without any option to make it play only once...)

- It will set animation keys to the focus distance based on the Autofocus interval value.
- Don't forget to disable Animate AF when you're done.

Note: It is clear that this workflow is outdated and would need to be improved to make it more user-friendly. This has been added to my to-do list, thank you for your patience

The video below shows how to use Autofocus Tools detail.

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