Any Interest for a new DoF plug-in?

Hello guys,

I'm the author of Fast Bokeh Pro, a DoF plug-in for AE. Lately, I got some requests about developing the plug-in for Fusion/Resolve and I'm currently exploring it. We're almost completely an AE only shop and the whole concept of "Nodal Interface" is still alien to us

Please do let me know if you have an interest in such a plug-in and also any other thoughts if you have any. Thanks!

Update:
We have a fully commercial version available for purchase.
https://www.rowbyte.com/fast-bokeh-openfx

Feel free to contact us directly or post here in this thread if you have any feedback. Thanks!

There is a very big need for a high-quality DOF plugin. Based on my experience, I will say that I have not found a full-fledged replacement for Frichsluft Lens care over the past 5 years. It's great that it continues to work in new versions of Fusion. But unfortunately it is very outdated and the developer has stopped developing it. It would be great if we got the Fast Bokeh Pro functionality. I am ready to participate as a beta tester (Fusion studio 9/17)

If you're looking for detailed guidance and help, in addition to this forum you should join the Fusion forum at www.steakunderwater.com - they have specific sections dealing with all sorts of developments from macros to Fuses (scripted plugins) to SDK plugins. I don't know your plugin, but I don't think the nodal part of the interface will have much influence on the workings of it.

I second what Max says above. I've used Frisch for many years and it's very good but hasn't had any development for at least five years, and every time I install a new version of Fusion I expect it to not work. Also, I've noticed some pretty big performance hits when using it in FuResolve and Fu17 plus, although I haven't had time to quantify this. Finally, I don't think it has ever used GPU processing which limits performance to CPU only which in a pretty heavy plug in is a real limitation.

A good DOF replacement would I think be enthusiastically taken up by a lot of Fusion users.

It's worth noting that it would have to work both in Resolve Studio (on the fusion page) and on the stand alone Fusion (studio at least). Most heavy vfx users use the Fusion Studio stand alone due to UI and performance issues in the Resolve Studio version.

And in an ideal world it would also work in Fusion Studio 9. A lot of power users are still using fu9 in production due to some seriously bad UI design that appeared in Fu16 onwards - there are loads of posts both here and on Steak Under Water about this, but basically Blackmagic redesigned the much admired Fu9 interface to make it look more like Resolve. In doing so they made it much slower and much less efficient in terms of work flow. Many many users have complained to BMD about this but so far to no effect.

Thanks for the responses. The plug-in will be an OpenFX implementation, so will likely work in Fusion 9 as well. As for nodal interface, it shouldn't have any effect on plug-in development.

I will post more details in the near future, hopefully we will have a beta soon. If you're curious about Fast Bokeh Pro, you can take the AE version for a spin.

Might be worth taking a look at the Fusion API (Contact BMD, you'll need to sign a NDA). In my experience it is a lot fast than OFX plugins (obviously not as flexible).

It'll be great to see it added to Nuke too.. always great having more options!

Shut up and take my money!

So we have an open beta for the plugin, but I'm not allowed to post urls here.
Can any admins here lift those restrictions?

Update:
If anybody is curious - they can checkout here
https://www.rowbyte.com/blog/fast-bokeh-openfx-beta

Hi Rowbyte

Great to see this beta, many thanks.

I've downloaded it and run some quick and dirty tests on a win10 laptop with 32g ram and an i7-4800MQ. I've used an old test bed I set up for Frischluft DOF. After I did a rough normalisation to get the zdepth figures between 1 and 0 your beta worked fine (although with some of the options turned off as you say in your post). It seems a bit faster than Frisch but the testbed is pretty simple so it's hard to tell.

Below is a screen grab with the results, your plug in on the left and Frisch on the right. The focus point is only eye matched due to the difference in expected Z figures (Frisch is 0-256 if I remember correctly) but the results are comparable.

There is the issue of overlap between objects with big differences in depth which is common to pretty much all post process DOF systems - see yellow circles. The left version was rendered with your "render each zone separately" turned on, with it off the hard edge in the overlap area was predictably much harsher. This helps but I think the Frisch overlap area, while not perfect, is a little less noticeable. I know you're aware of this issue as shown by the video demonstrating the render zone feature on your website. Not sure what the Frisch guys did to get the slight improvement and I know that it's probably impossible to get rid of this type of artifact in a post process but I thought you might be interested in the comparison.

Just though I'd let you know it works. Looking forward to the next beta!

cheers

Looks like Frischluft method adds blurred bg to fg, which is a rudimentary method of bg restoration for areas where occluded geometry becomes visible due to fg defocusing. It is very similar to blur + unpremult edge extend method.

Hi Rowbyte

Great to see this beta, many thanks.

I've downloaded it and run some quick and dirty tests on a win10 laptop with 32g ram and an i7-4800MQ. I've used an old test bed I set up for Frischluft DOF. After I did a rough normalisation to get the zdepth figures between 1 and 0 your beta worked fine (although with some of the options turned off as you say in your post). It seems a bit faster than Frisch but the testbed is pretty simple so it's hard to tell.

Below is a screen grab with the results, your plug in on the left and Frisch on the right. The focus point is only eye matched due to the difference in expected Z figures (Frisch is 0-256 if I remember correctly) but the results are comparable.

There is the issue of overlap between objects with big differences in depth which is common to pretty much all post process DOF systems - see yellow circles. The left version was rendered with your "render each zone separately" turned on, with it off the hard edge in the overlap area was predictably much harsher. This helps but I think the Frisch overlap area, while not perfect, is a little less noticeable. I know you're aware of this issue as shown by the video demonstrating the render zone feature on your website. Not sure what the Frisch guys did to get the slight improvement and I know that it's probably impossible to get rid of this type of artifact in a post process but I thought you might be interested in the comparison.

Just though I'd let you know it works. Looking forward to the next beta!

cheers

Thanks for taking the time and giving it a spin, much appreciated! You're right that the foreground blurring is a tricky thing for a post process DoF plug-in because it doesn't have all the pixels.

BUT..if you check the "Render Each Zone Separately" and also make sure that the foreground, focus and background zones are indeed in separate zones (needs some parameter tuning), then the 'hard edge' issues should almost go away or a lot less pronounced. I'm guessing you had the "Render Each Zone" checked on, but probably the zones are not clearly defined. If possible please send me the footage (or attach it here) and I'd love to give it a try.

Thanks.

Edit:

I've managed to create a similar scene in Fusion (forgive the terrible lighting setup) and had a go. I think the edges you describe are definitely there even in Multiple Zone Rendering. It's a little more prominent in Fusion than in AE probably due to different color space setup. In any case an Edge Extend method for focus zone pixels described by Hendrik Proosa is worth exploring.

fusionshot.jpg (776.86 KiB) Viewed 3087 times

This is awesome, count me in as a customer already! your other products would also be amazing additions to Fusion, Plexus is a work of art and Aura looks beautiful.

Hey Rowbyte

As per your request, I tried to upload an exr of my test pic (16 bit float) to this thread for you to play with but it said there was a 2mg limit. So I trimmed it to under 2 megs by losing some layers and it then said exr files were not allowed. So I zipped it up so that it was a zip file - it then said the limit was now 1 meg! So I went back to the exr file and changed the suffix to "rgb" just for the upload - it then said "rgb files not allowed"! Grrrrrr.

I give up. Maybe you should mirror this on WeSuckLess? Much easier to exchange code etc than here.

cheese

Short version: yes. The DOF node in Fusion is... lacking to say the least.

FYI, there used to be a 3rd-party DOF plugin as part of a plugin pack but it's long been defunct. It seems to have been well-regarded. This was around long before I ever used Fusion so I can't provide any details but perhaps others can. Perhaps it can serve as an inspiration?

To begin your search for it, try typing "Frantic Films Software Releases Awake Plugin Pack for eyeon Fusion" in your favorite search engine.

(I'm also a big fan of Plexus.)

Cool, will be checking this out!

Would love a Linux version to be on the radar. Even though we're on Windows for artist workstations, the farm is Linux, so probably a dealbreaker at scale.

Still looking forward to checking it out though and thanks for porting it over. Definitely some issues with the OFX Frischluft outstanding that I don't think the dev could work out with the BMD folks, so this is a welcome addition to the conversation!

Thanks for all your comments and interest!

Linux version - We don't have a Linux pipeline yet for plug-ins, so currently not possible. Maybe in the future.

Thanks for all your comments and interest!

Linux version - We don't have a Linux pipeline yet for plug-ins, so currently not possible. Maybe in the future.

Hey guys, any update on this?
Is there a plan to release the plugin? I'd buy it for sure.

Hey guys,

Just posting an update here. A full commercially supported version is available for purchase now. Now is the time to put money where one's mouth is

Only macOS/Win for now though.
https://www.rowbyte.com/fast-bokeh-openfx

I just found this!, nice! thankyou I'm getting it.