Camera Settings

The Camera tab in the Render Controls dialog has controls for adjusting the camera's field of view, depth of field, and focal offset.

Field of View
An image rendered with the default 70° FoV:



The same scene rendered with 17° FoV:



Depth of Field
Depth of field decides how blurry things that are not in the focal plane will be. If depth of field is set to infinity everything in the scene will be rendered in focus.

A scene rendered with DoF set to infinity:

The same scene rendered with DoF set to 3:

Focal Offset
Focal offset decides how far the focal plane is from the camera. If you want to focus an object that is 20 blocks away the focal plane should be set to 20. Estimating the distance (in blocks) to a given object is a good way to make an initial guess for the correct focal offset setting.

The following method is one practical way of finding the focal offset in order to have the focal plane where desired.


 * 1) Start by setting DoF to a low value. I chose 3 in this image: Dof1.png
 * 2) Now adjust FoV to zoom in on where you want the image to be focused: Dof2.png
 * 3) Try to find a focal offset that causes the image to be rendered mostly sharply, then fine-tune the offset to get it right where you want it: Dof3.png
 * 4) Last, zoom out to the original field of view setting. Adjust DoF so that you get the desired depth effect (look for example at objects in the foreground/background and adjust DoF until they are as blurry or sharp as you want them to be): Dof4.png