Tore

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Thanks for the answers, Robert! (Love especially the first african mask, square mouth and all) Regarding splash screen: it could be argued that - in the name of personal freedom of choice - there should be an user option to turn it on and of...

Just a little and kind'a silly question: What is distinctly african about the color scheme "African Gray"? Oh, and another one: is it possible to turn the splash screen off, say in the preferences or otherwise?

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Just to be sure, did you make a bug report for this issue? I can't find it in the Mantis? By the way, any qualified guess on a release date for vers. 19?

Moving the backdrop closer didn't change anything, but I tried turning of the volumetrics of the blue spot shining through the window, and that did the trick. But of course it also changed the look of the picture completely.

No to both questions. You can se how the scene is constructed here: The window is just a hole, and the wall seen through it is just a normal imagemapped plane. It is a bit strange as the depthmap itself has an absolutely clean edge. Maybe it is due to the high contrast?

Ah, you're absolutely right. My mistake. I confused some of the early 18 versions for 16 and 17. So here is the same scene rendered in A:M 17 without multipass and thus with fast dof. Render time 30 seconds. Looks much much better than the Fusion version, but still some artifacts (along the edge of the window). Looks promising - have to experiment with this some more.

Would like to, but those versions of A:M where fast DOF is supposed to work, will not run on my machine without crashing it. You made a bug report for ver. 19, so I guess I'll have to wait til that is released

Some examples/tests done in A:M 18: This is multipass (9x) with depth of field - rendertime 1 minute 30 seconds And here is the saved depth buffer used in Fusion 8 (free software) to apply a blur ...resulting in this - rendertime 25 seconds (plus the time in Fusion):

Tried to get it to work in vers. 15 and with Rob's files, but had no succes. Wonder if there is a step-by-step tut somewhere? Oh, and by the way: that old-fashioned ray-tracing with cheatDOF can look very good indeed (even with a lot of camera movements) can be seen in this (non-A:M) animation: https://vimeo.com/16099684

Those Lego renders looks really good, Robert! A downer that fast DOF doesn't work in 18. I really could use that. Wonder if the cause is a reportable bug, or if it is because that feature has been discontinued...?

Thanks for all the illuminating answers! Actually I wasn't aware that dof worked at all in A:M outside multipass. Allthough it doesn't sound all that promising, quality wise. I guess the OpenEXR is the way to go. Thanks for the link Robert, and Rodney for the the reference to Fusion 8, which I didn't know. It seems very interesting!

In this (non-A:M) rendering, depth of field is achieved as postrender blurring via a generated depth buffer. I wonder of this same technique can be used in A:M? This would for me be preferrable to the standard way of doing dof in A:M, which involve loooong (sometimes up to 20 minutes) rendertimes to look good (as comparison the above picture rendered in a little under 2 seconds, including the blurring process). Apparently there IS a depth buffer present in A:M, but I have never come to grips with how to use it. It would be so nice if this could be done inside A:M itself without having to use some compositing software like After Effects (which I cannot afford).

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Nothing to do with A:M - not even CGI, but a beautifully made and inspiring stop motion short by estian artist Anu-Laura Tuttelberg. Partly done in wet clay, thus the main character had to be completely re-modeled for every frame. No lamps were used in the shooting, only the existing daylight coming through the windows in the studio. https://vimeo.com/89515712

Great! Thanks!!

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