When doing a landscape, I'd like to have my objects blurred when they are in the distance, say a mountain.
In order to do that, I go to the Material Lab and choose "Distance Blur", "Volume Blend Altitude" and "Volume Blend Distance" from the Material Lab, See screenshot. But even after applying these settings, I did not find my objects blurred enough, so I increase the transparency to about 125-150%. It is not bad BUT, when doing this, if there are 2 mountains that are close and that one of them overlap the other, it is annoying because you can see parts of the other mountain through it!!! So you must do kind of a calculation for this not to happen. So if one of you guys (Sem or Odidio) find a better setting for this, just let me know.

thanx!!!

Hi Uguel,
Take a look at Control ~"Render options" in the main window. Set this to "Premium", you can then select "depth of field", changing the "lens radius" gives some interesting results for "Depth of field",.. but, I have not played too much with this yet.

Have you looked into the "distance mask" yet?

Hey thanks Stem, I was just reading a little about this ( scroll down to the 'Rendering' section ). Thing was they didn't say where to find the options. I like the bit about total internal reflectio too.

A possible nontechnical solution might be to duplicate the mountain, then in attributes increase it's size slightly. Now give it a fog preset and play with the controls to get the right blurry look. (?)

Hi odidio,

The "Depth of Field" is easy to control. Below I have attached a simple example. For the "Focal Length" you can simply select the object you want to be focused, then in the render options "Premium / Focal Lenght ~ set to current selection. (For the example I selected the front "green" block). Then change the setting for "Lens Radius" (Example shown: original: lens radius @ 0.1/0.2/0.5)

Hey, thanx! Yes I tried that but I don't now why, with my mountain selected and "render to current selection" applied
from the render options), it would apply the settings to all the elements that I have in my scene. But there is something
more that I have to check. Perhaps my mountain is not far enough and Bryce is much smarter than me, lol So it would
blur it accordingly to the distance the object is positioned and not accoding to the user's intentions!

Thanx Odidio, This sounds as a good solution to me! But, where shall I go to apply the fog preset.
I mean with the mountain selected, did you go to the material lab? Or did you go to the sky lab instead?

oh and yes, I am currently reading the tips from the BSolutions' page! :thumbup:

So if I understood well, instead of blurring the object(s) in the distance, you only preserve the one that do not
need to be be blurred, i.e. the green block, right? Can you please send me a screenshot of the
"Render Options" window you had for I'd like to see the focal lenght settings. No rush though,
you send it whenever it suits you! Thanx!!!!

Hi Uguel,

With depth of field, there needs to be a focal point. For the example with the 3 blocks, I simply selected the first (green) block, then in the render settings, I selected "set to current selection (under "focal lenght") this then automatically sets the correct distance from the camera to the centre of the selected object.

Thanx Sem! I get it now. So the thing we have to do is to adjust the settings of the Lens Radius
and Focal lenght until we are satisfied and then Bryce will do the calculation and applies the
depth of field to the objects in the distance according to the object selected (which is also the
focal point). One thing though, from what I can see, the depth of field must be use with parsimony
for the sky gets a bit too blurry when the settings are increased too much.

And I think this is what the page (http://www.bsmooth.de/BSolutions/#Index) was talking about.
That the depth of field will make the sky too blurry sometimes.....
Fom the tips given, you can also use some of the Material Lab buttons and alter the colour
of the selected objects so that they will look blurred and give the impression that they are farther.
If I remember well, she/he modified the Specular Halo settings to get this effect. The advantage
is that the sky won't be get blurred, it will remain the same, only the selected objects will be modified.


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Now, I have another question. The other day I did a "Walk With MeTutorial",
and I noticed that the guy could access HSV ( Hue, Saturation, and Value) colours
simply by doing Alt + Click On the first thumbnail of the sky option. See screenshot below.
I tried it and I did not get these options! I just get the RGB colours and that's all.
One thing though, he said that he has Bryce 4. So could it be that the developers
did not include that function anymore in the latest Bryce versions? If you can
access this, just let me know!

The Sky Tutorial

Hi Uguel,

Yes, the Depth of field can cause unwanted blurring. I still have to play with this more.
I still think better "blurring" can be made using either a "Distance" or "Object" mask, and then perform a depth of field within a photo editing program.
Yes. I have these options, as shown in the posted image.

Edit: Note, that on the first sky "thumbnail" there is a small triangle just below it, this gives a drop down menu, you should set this to "Custom" to get the full colour options.

thanx Stem, I got it! :thumbup: Alt+Click must be done all at once!
if not, you don't get it. Yes, my settings were set to custom.

It was the material lab, I just turned the duplicate mountain to fog.

I like these render possibilities :thumbup: , they do increase the render time quite a bit though.

Thanx for the tip Odidio, I never get too much of them! :thumbup: