Defocus node is not doing anything

[Zach Zellman]

I can’t seem to get the defocus node to work. I plugged in the depth output into the Z input, and checked “use Z buffer”. With that enabled nothing happens when I mess around with any of the settings. Do I have to re-render the scene?

[Kent Trammell]

Are you sourcing your depth pass from a saved rendered image (like EXR) or are you sourcing it from the temporary render in Blender? (as in when you click render, the image is only saved in RAM until you save it to you hard drive)

[rjk337]

Hey Kent, I have the same issue – the depth information is certainly there in the .exr, I can see it with the help of a normalize node, but when plugged into a defocus node it either blurs everything without z-buffer or does nothing with it. I can’t upload the screenshot for some reason but the settings I use are: F-stop @ 1 / Max blur @ 16 / Threshold @ 1 / Z-buffer ON. Blender 2.79

[Kent Trammell]

The defocus node + z-depth pass works a bit differently for .exr – which I failed to cover in the depth of field lesson 😞

With .exr the User Z-Buffer option is disabled because that’s only relevant to the raw render data from a 3D scene, not the data converted to .exr. I just tested that it still works, so here’s a screenshot of a simple setup:

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