Hello,
I’m working on a project in which i want to create a highresolution screenshot where only the building is in focus, and the foreground and background are (extremely) out of focus, which shouldn’t be so difficult to do, since normally it’s just a matter of lowering the aperture to a low value (f1.2).
As you can see in this image, the green zone should be in focus and the red zone should be out of focus.
so i placed a camera, and set the manual focus distance to be on the building, and set the aperture to a value of f1.2. but somehow, the near distance (bush) and the far distance are still extremely sharp and in focus.
what is it that i’m doing wrong?
Would love to hear from you,
Kind regards,
Philip
@ClockworkOcean any ideas from our mastermind? 
@3dRaven @AustrianMunzter do you guys have an idea about what’s wrong by any chance?
thanks in advance!!
The engine is very fussy about the DOF settings. There’s a sweet spot between 0.000045365 and 0.000030454
Just kidding, but it’s almost that bad.
I’ll come back with some more realistic figures.
is it just me that is experiencing this? because if i’m not mistaken, if you use a regular real-life camera with the same focal length and you set the aperture to be f1.2, you’d definitely get a blurry fore- and background…
@ClockworkOcean
I give up, it’s getting harder and harder to control this thing.
I can get stuff in the distance out of focus, but not also foreground objects…
@ClockworkOcean how do you get the background out of focus?
Well it the cinema camera does behave like a real camera. To get blurry backgrounds in a real camera, you can do a couple of things. But most importantly, you must understand how the Aperture (F-Stop) and Focal-Length numbers come into play.
Typically you can achieve a blurry background by a clear separation of Object and Background (which is the case in your scene), a high focal length (50+mm), and a low Aperture (2.8 and lower). (Numbers are suggestions but don´t necessarily make sense in your context)
This should blur your background quite nicely. Increase the focal length (to 100 or smth), and your background should be even more blurry. Keep in mind that an increase in focal length is a “zoom”, so you might wanna readjust cam position,
Edit: I see in your post that you have a focal length of 12mm, which is very wide. It will be rather hard to get physically correct out of focus in this setting.
Take this as Starting Setup, we wanna focus on the grey sphere with a cinema cam.
This is what it looks like with default setting. 35mm focal length and aperture 2.8f.
Red Cube ist still very sharp. But if I move the cinema cam back, adjust the focal length to 150 and the f-stop to the minimum of 1.2f, you can see that the red cube is getting more and more blurry, even tho I only moved the camera and adjusted the settings.
Be interesting to see if you can get blurred foreground and background… 
The Same principle applies with Foreground as it does with Background. The “Focus Area” (Area that is in focus) is getting smaller with higher focal length. The Aperture (apart from usually controlling the amount of light in the lens) controls the INTENSITY of the blur.
Same setup as before:
Cam settings 35mm and 1.2f Stop. Cam needed to be closer to the object in order to have roughly the same composition. Green and Red are fairly sharp, even with 1.2f:
And then our 150mm and cam moved back a bit to get all the objects in the frame. 150mm + 1.2f:
Green and Red are deliciously blurry.
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Cool. Mind you, was much easier in 4 
( I’m gonna try it )
Could it be that your scalability setting is set to Low? I could be mistaken but I think that disables DoF.
See the section on Post Process Quality.
Yep! You need a high focus length and a very low aperture (you can even use 0.5).
Or you can make a post process dof material to get unnatural dof blurry levels.
