I had an idea that I could use the user_defined_camera in Megapov to give me a
better focal blur than I was getting with my existing Camera35mm macros in
"stochastic rendering" mode, so I started hacking together some functions that
worked with the feature.

Long story short, I suck at maths.

But... I'm almost there. The basic premise (use the user_defined_camera to vary
every pixels focal blur offset) seems to work very well. Compared to the POV
focal blur with very high settings, I tend to prefer the user_defined_camera
version in most parts of the image, and I know that more passes would improve
any remaining artifacts.

I'm still struggling with only being able to use functions (which I've just
started to learn more about) and my maths is, as I said, pretty poor. At the
moment this code only works along the Z axis with the focal plane at z=0, but
I'm on the home stretch now, and I should be able to do the final work to set an
arbitrary "look_at" and "location", as long as I can get my head around the
relevant transform functions.

So, umm, is there any chance we could get the "user_defined_camera" into POV
3.7? It always struck me as the right way to add arbitrary new camera types to
POV, as opposed to having to change the actual code, and this experiment, to me
at least, certainly confirms this premise.

Cheers,
Edouard.

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Am 09.05.2010 13:46, schrieb Edouard:

> So, umm, is there any chance we could get the "user_defined_camera" into POV
> 3.7? It always struck me as the right way to add arbitrary new camera types to
> POV, as opposed to having to change the actual code, and this experiment, to me
> at least, certainly confirms this premise.

To be honest, I'd rather see the effort invested into improving the 
existing focal blur mechanism.

Something like a decent jittering mechanism - plus maybe a pattern to 
define the aperture shape (and hence control the bokeh).

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clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> Am 09.05.2010 13:46, schrieb Edouard:
>
> > So, umm, is there any chance we could get the "user_defined_camera" into POV
> > 3.7? It always struck me as the right way to add arbitrary new camera types to
> > POV, as opposed to having to change the actual code, and this experiment, to me
> > at least, certainly confirms this premise.
>
> To be honest, I'd rather see the effort invested into improving the
> existing focal blur mechanism.
>
> Something like a decent jittering mechanism - plus maybe a pattern to
> define the aperture shape (and hence control the bokeh).

Absolutely - I hope my investigations may be applicable to the 3.7 codebase. The
focal blur code really is in need of the improvements. My existing Camera35mm
macros do shaped bokeh as well, so I imagine that would be a simple thing to add
too.

But, this is just one (rather unusual) example of what user_defined_camera can
give you without having to make any further changes to the c++ codebase. Any
projection not supported by 3.7 can be added via a macro in an include file -
that kind of flexibility is really powerful.

Cheers,
Edouard.

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