Auto Focus Point

[Phawniks]

Some scenes have an atom labled auto focus point and I can't figure out how it works with macgrubers post magic plugin to function. If anyone could explain it to me I'd appreciate it.

 

[MacGruber]

PostMagic's Depth of Field effect is looking for an atom with that name, the name has to be "AutoFocusPoint" exactly. That atom's position is then used to tell the plugin what you want to focus on in the scene. It just constantly calculates the distance from the camera to that atom and uses it to set the plugin's FocusDistance setting. The more the distance of some pixel on screen varies from FocusDistance, the more blurry it will be. It's kind of like tapping the screen on your phone to focus something when you take a picture. Usually you would parent the AutoFocusPoint to the head of the character or something like that, but you could also animate the position, etc.

(Note: I believe you need to explicitly enable AutoFocus in the plugin's settings, can't check from here)

 

[Phawniks]

Thank you

 

[too]

PostMagic's Depth of Field effect is looking for an atom with that name, the name has to be "AutoFocusPoint" exactly. That atom's position is then used to tell the plugin what you want to focus on in the scene. It just constantly calculates the distance from the camera to that atom and uses it to set the plugin's FocusDistance setting. The more the distance of some pixel on screen varies from FocusDistance, the more blurry it will be. It's kind of like tapping the screen on your phone to focus something when you take a picture. Usually you would parent the AutoFocusPoint to the head of the character or something like that, but you could also animate the position, etc.

(Note: I believe you need to explicitly enable AutoFocus in the plugin's settings, can't check from here)

"AutoFocusPoint" is a severely underrated option.

I kind of wish this was more prominently noted in the Depth Of Field instructions. Without it, the DoF setting is almost moot to use in a scene with lots of camera movement.

SUPER awesome tool. Now I need to figure out how to use this in more scenes.

 

[Damarmau]

Most of my scenes and environments have an atom called autofocus point already set up with postmagic as a plugin on that atom. If you save presets of them you can easily load in other scenes with it already set up.

This is an old tutorial vid I made on how to set it up. I no longer use postmagic in the scenes plugin tab and put it on the autofocuspoint itself as it makes it easier to save out and load up different lut presets but, the process of setting up the near and far focus is the same.

AutoFocusPoint.mp4

drive.google.com