Depth of Field Parameter (mental ray, iray, and Quicksilver Renderers)

On the Parameters rollout, a “Depth Of Field (mental ray/iray)” choice supports the renderer's native depth-of-field effect. This works for the mental ray, iray, and Quicksilver Hardware renderers. To use this, turn on Enable in the camera's Multi-Pass Effect group. Also turn on Depth Of Field on the Camera Effects rollout of the Render Setup dialog.

• Create panel > (Cameras) > Target button or Free button > Parameters rollout > Multi-Pass Effect group. > Turn on Enable and choose Depth Of Field (mental ray). > Depth of Field Parameters rollout

The native renderer depth-of-field effect is exclusive of the multi-pass version of the depth-of-field effect. (The mental ray and iray renderers also support motion blur for cameras, but the controls are not on the camera's Parameters rollout: Use the Motion Blur toggle on the Object Properties dialog for camera objects.) This setting has no effect on the default 3ds Max scanline renderer.

While Nitrous viewports are active, Camera viewports also display depth of field when Enable is turned on.

Note: When you use the mental ray or iray renderer, reflected or refracted light rays do not always respect a camera's clipping planes (set in the Clipping Planes group of the Parameters rollout). Also, large clipping-plane values can cause poor quality in the rendering of shadow maps. To fix this, narrow the clipping range or use ray-traced shadows.

Interface

f-Stop

Sets the camera's f-Stop. Increasing the f-Stop value narrows the depth of field, and decreasing the f-Stop value broadens the depth of field. Default=2.0.

The f-Stop can have a value less than 1.0. This is not realistic in terms of an actual camera, but it can help you adjust the depth of field for scenes whose scale does not use realistic units.