Abstract

We developed our depth of field effect from Gillham's ShaderX⁵ one. Like his and other similar techniques, we work with low-resolution buffers when they are blurry and lerp between blurred and sharp versions of the screen. The elements of our improvements to previous methods are treating near field separately to produce blurry silhouettes on the near field, inpainting behind blurry near-field objects, a selective background blur kernel, using circle of confusion instead of depth to resolve occlusion and blur simultaneously, and processing multiple blurs in parallel with dual render targets.

Notes

The algorithm is continuously maintained as open source (BSD license) in the G3D Innovation Engine. The files are:

1. GLSL Shaders
2. C++ Header
3. C++ Source
4. C++ Configuration

Variants of this algorithm have been used in several games and engines, many of which we can't report publicly because of NDAs. One publicly acknowledged version is the Fabric RTR engine for film previsualization.

The single chapter may be purchsed from the publisher.

BibTex

@incollection{Bukowski2013DepthOfField, 
  author = {Mike Bukowski and Padraic Hennessy and Brian Osman and Morgan McGuire}, 
  title = {The {Skylanders SWAP Force} Depth-of-Field Shader}, 
  booktitle = {Published in {GPU} Pro 4: Advanced Rendering Techniques},
  note = {GPU Pro4},
  month = {April},
  day = {26},
  year = {2013}, 
  pages = {175--184},
  url = {https://casual-effects.com/research/Bukowski2013DepthOfField/index.html}, 
}