[Bf-committers] Depth of Field

[onk]

Hi there,

> Is the author of the zBlur plugin still an active developer?

Kind of. Slipping more into image processing though :-)

Well, I haven't touched the ZBlur for a long time... Actually, it's 
something that should be integrated into the render pipeline, because it 
doesn't really serve well as a postprocessing plugin, for the following 
reasons:
- Only 8 bit depth: Should move to float intensity images (or 16 bit 
depth) for the proper saturation effects (intensity bleeding).
- zbuffer is not antialiased - this looks horrible on sharp edges
- The halo problem that ton already mentioned - halos should not be 
affected by ZBlur, because they are a lens effect themselves.
- It's a bad hack and could be a little faster. Currently, it's just a 
darn slow generic convolution matrix with different 'iris sizes'.

I don't think it should be a big problem to get access to the high_depth 
render buffers and solve at least the saturation problem.
Improving the z buffering though is another story. (keep in mind that 
for lens equations it needs to be somewhat linearized...)

Greetings,

- Strubi