Why is the DOF on my Niagara Particles not aligned with the DOF of normal objects in the scene?

Hello dear community,

I’ve been using Unreal for ~5 days now so this might be a fairly dumb question.

What I want to achieve:
So I want to use Niagara to render some meshes made from particles and have it render with a tilt shift effect so only some of the emitted particles would be in focus. I want the particles in the front and in the back to be out of focus.

My problem:
While setting this scene up and using the “Cine Camera Actor”, I noticed that I couldn’t quite get the tilt shift effect that I wanted. Particles would be either completly in focus or completly out of focus.

Visualization of my problem:
I set up an experiment illustrating my problem. There are three cubes and the cine camera actor. Each of the cubes has a Niagara System on top:

If I pull focus on the different cubes, the corresponding Niagara System should be in focus too, right?
Unfortunately this is not the case. It is only when I put the manual focus distance very high, that the Niagara Systems are in focus again:

So why is the DOF of a Niagra System differing from the DOF from the cubes? Is it even possible to achieve a tilt shift look with Niagara Particles?

Thank you very much!

Try to check this box in your particle material and see if it fix your issue:

I am having the same issue in UE5 now and this unfortunately didn’t help :frowning:

Found it! There is a tutorial: Particles Not Blurring Fix Unreal 5 - YouTube

You need to switch settings of material used in Niagara system. In material deaitl type in “Translucency Pass” and switch to “Before DOF”.