C4D/AE Tut: Depth Passes Made Easy + Frischluft Lenscare and Camera Lens Blur

In this C4D and After Effects Tutorial I’ll show you a very quick and easy way to set up your depth passes correctly so you can do your DOF in After Effects. This workflow will make it much easier, faster and more flexible to work with depth of field. I’ll show you two ways to use your depth pass, the free Camera Lens Blur and a plugin called Frischluft Lenscare.

Check out the plugin here for the best prices: bit.ly/MzicrM

Here is the shot using Frischluft Lenscare

Here is the shot using the free Camera Lens Blur

11 Responses
  1. BaranM

    Well played, pure coincidence, I was playing with this plugin last night and couldn’t figure out, for the life of me, what that highlight selection was meant to do. Now I know. Great site and very useful tutorials. By the way, just a hint as to what would attract a larger crowd to this site is animated sequence compositing from C4D to AE. There are quite a few with objects onto video/still but not a lot with animated 3d sequences onto video. I for one would be your ambassador for your site,guaranteed! Just sayin’ 😉

  2. Hi Joren,
    another way to get a good DOF-Pass is to set the Focus-distance to 0 and then use the rear-blur to control where the pass ends…pretty much the same idea just the other way around 😀
    Great tutorial!

  3. Mark

    Helpful overview, thanks for sharing this. Something I’ve noticed is that 3D layers that have alpha sometimes show fringing or artifacting when using DOF effects. Any suggestions for reducing those issues, either in render settings and/or in the compositing process?

  4. Philip

    Yeh Alphas and DOF don’t work properly in Cinema, i use a Plug-In called enDOFin in C4D and it works with alphas on the depth pass

  5. Yuri

    Hey Jesse,

    You can find the plugin folder:
    Applications/Adobe After Effects CS#/Plug-ins/

    Where # is your version number.
    Just drop it right there 🙂

    on topic: thanks for the tutorial, needed that one!

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