Adding a niagra affect above a blur.

Hello, I am trying to create a scene where a person is looking out of a window and eventually, I want this scene to blur heavily as if a camera FOV is adjusting for extremely up-close shots, to show rain coming down.

Here are storyboard images for the idea:

I know how to create rain via the niagara system and apply an entire blur to the screen. I am asking how I can apply the blur affect to the screen and then overlay it with the niagara rain affect? Any advice would be helpful.

Sorry if this was in the wrong catergory.

Welcome to the community!

I think the best option you would have is to do it the way it would be done practically, exactly as you described. So you setup a camera far from the subject and give it a very small FOV. Set your focal distance to the characters distance from the camera set the F-Stop to be small and the sensor width to be large and you’ll get a very narrow depth of field.

That image is from a tiltshift effect I setup the other day so the numbers won’t be exactly what you need you’ll want to tweak them for your own needs but the process is pretty similar. In my example the camera was 5000 units away with an FOV of 15 but that is probably too extreme for your requirements, however distance is your friend when it comes to easily managed focal planes.

Then you setup the rain effect at the correct distance that works for you, remembering this is a fairly long zoom so you’ll probably need it somewhere about half way between your character and your subject (you’ll need to experiment a bit probably further than you think).

Then you can simply update the focal distance of your post process from the character to the Niagara effect and it should work. If you want a slower rack focus you could lerp that value with a timeline or similar to have it not snap so much.

Hopefully that will give you a push in the right direction if not exactly what you were looking for.