#reshade dof

DOF effects won’t work with anti-aliasing on. So under Options make sure to have Edge Smoothing is Off. You can add your own anti-alising with reshade (SMAA is my fave but there are more options)

The depth buffer is reversed. Under “Edit Global Preprocessor Definitions” make sure RESHADE_DEPTH_INPUT_IS_REVERSED is set to 0 and not 1.

(the MXAO settings you see below can be taken from Picture Amoebae and I strongly recommend that you do so)

So this might be a Sims 3 1.69 thing since I suspect its part of its DRM to always be online when you are playing. Reshade has a built in feature to disable the depth buffer (so no dof effects) if you are online so you don’t possible get banned or cheat in online games.

If you DOF effects stop working or never work, clicked on D3D9 tab in reshade and see if you see the following message “High network activity discovered. Access to depth buffers is disabled to exploitation”.

This can’t be changed in Reshade. You are going to need to find a new version thats been modded. So you can set up a dev environment and tinker with Reshades code to turn off that feature or you can do what I did and just google a copy of reshade that is modded already or skim through github and find a version.

Background weirdness:

MagicDoF shader > MagicDoF Quality = 8000 (or similar; the higher the greater the offset)

I’ll take the second problem first: the game has its own rudimentary type of DoF. It’s not great, but it’s there to hide the flat, low detail textures of the backdrops. There are mods that will let you turn it off, or you can turn it off yourself (which is what I do). 

Go into your Bin folder, and open up graphicsrules.sgr in a text editor (preferably one that makes it easy to ready stuff -- I use Notepad++).

Press ctrl+f in Notepad++ (I’m guessing most editors have a similar search function) and type in DofEnabled and press Find Next. 

It will take you to a section that begins ‘option LightingQuality’, with sub-sections for each level of graphics quality (Low, Medium, High, Very High). Find the sub-section that corresponds to the quality you have set in the game. You’ll see a line that says ‘prop $ConfigGroup DofEnabled true’ -- change the true to false and save.

If you’re not sure which sub-section is the right one, change #prop $ConfigGroup DofEnabled true’ to false in all of them.

Fun fact: a few lines above that is ‘prop $ConfigGroup SsaoEnabled true’. This is what you edit to get rid of the game’s atrocious ambient occlusion (their very bad version of mxao). If you set this line to false it will get rid of their bad ao, but it will also disable DoF, so you don’t have to change the DofEnabled line as well. I only turn off the Ssao line and it switches off them both. Two birds, one stone.

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Back to the first question: I’m going to assume you have the depth buffer set up correctly. So we need to look at your focusing method in the DoF shader.

A lot of people tick the auto-focus and mouse-driven auto-focus boxes, because it makes it easy to focus. With these two options checked, wherever you point your mouse will be in focus, and everything behind it will start to become blurred. I don’t use that method because it doesn’t work with SRWE (if you don’t know what SRWE is don’t worry about this, it doesn’t apply to your question) so I don’t have it set up like that. I left it set up with manual focus.

If you want to continue using manual focus, the settings you  need to control where the focus lies are primarily the manual focus depth and near and far blur curves. 

The manual focus depth is where the focus should be. So, imagine you standing with a camera, you’re at 0.000. Look into the far distance and imagine the sky is a big cardboard backdrop way back there: that’s 1.000. Everything in between falls somewhere along the distance between 0.000 and 1.000. If you want to have the sharpest focus be on a tree that is approximately 20% of the way in front of you, you would want to set the manual focus depth as 0.200.

Most of the close portraits I take have the manual depth set at around 0.020-0.040. 

Near blur curve and far blur curve determine how softly or sharply the blur starts in front of and behind your focus point. Higher numbers mean the blur starts much more softly and further away from the focus point. Smaller numbers mean the blur starts much more sharply (or abruptly) and closer to the focus point.

I leave near blur curve set at its maximum because I don’t think the regular DoF shader handles near blur very well (near blur means blur in between you and your focus point). If you want good near blur look at the Cinematic DoF shader instead.

I generally leave far blur curve set at its default, but for some wide landscape shots where I just want a gentle blur in the distance I will increase it so there isn’t an obvious line where the blur begins. Far blur is the blur that falls behind your focus point, in between it and the backdrop.

Hi anon.

You’re using ReShade, yes?

The DoF shader needs to know where to focus, first. If you have auto-focus and mouse-driven auto-focus enabled then that focus point will be wherever you point your mouse. That’s a really easy way to get the hang of the other aspects of DoF without worrying about manual focus (which can be tricky to get used to).

Once you’ve got the focus sorted out so your subject is in focus and the background is out of focus, you need to look at the strength of the blur (which in the DoF shader is called Blur Radius). The higher the number the stronger the blur and the bigger the bokeh shapes.

You can also go down into the settings for individual DoF types and see if they have settings for bokeh. 

One of the popular DoFs is MartyMcFlyDoF. To find the settings for that, scroll down in the DoF shader until you find the lines for ADOF. Here you can change all sorts of things, for example the shape of the bokeh (whether it’s a pentagon, hexagon, round, etc), or brightness of it. One setting that might be particularly useful is ADOF_BokehCurve. That controls how bright the bokeh appears. You’ll want to change it while you have DoF enabled and have a scene where there are bright areas in the background (like lights, or gaps in between tree leaves against a bright sky) so you can see what effect changing that value has.

It looks like he still hasn’t added mouse-driven af into the qUINT version (someone asked for it to be included and he said he might, but...) so it won’t be possible.

I use manual focusing, which I find it be easier than auto-focus (without it being mouse-driven). 

With manual focusing what you’re doing is setting the focus plane, rather than a spot in the centre (or wherever) of the screen at which to determine the focus point. It means that if you manually set the focus plane to be at a distance of 0.4 it will always be at that distance, regardless of what gets in the way.

You do still have to change that focus plane distance a lot, but I find it less annoying and more precise than using the auto-focus coordinates. 

If I am taking a lot of portraits or gameplay scene shots I often find I keep it at between 0.1 and 0.4, but for landscape shots where I want just a little blur in the far distance I will sometimes crank it up higher, in conjunction with the far plane blur value.

Marty McFly, the author of MXAO and the ADOF DoF shaders, has put out a pack of new and updated shaders. It’s called qUINT and you can download here.

Some are more up-to-date versions of shaders included in the regular ReShade download, some are entirely new. You can simply copy them over into your reshade-shaders folder and start using them as normal (if any have the same file name as current shaders, say YES when asked if you would like to copy and replace) see edit at bottom.

IMPORTANT: Be sure to thoroughly read his thread and any documentation before using them, and again if you run into any problems. Make a backup of your current reshade-shaders folder first in case you want to revert.

Again, these are not currently included in the standard ReShade shader download when you install ReShade as normal. There are still versions of MXAO and ADOF in the regular download, and you can keep using them if you prefer. These qUINT shaders are simply alternatives and additions, and are the ones currently under regular development by Marty. 

If you start using the qUINT shaders, you may have to edit your current MXAO and DoF settings to suit. See edit at bottom.

One exciting addition is the Lightroom shader. I have an early experimental version of this that I’ve been using for a while, and it aims to bring a whole host of editing options under one shader to cut out the need for multiples. I haven’t used this latest version yet, but the older version had an option to create a LUT directly within the GUI, which would include any Lightroom effects AND any others from other shaders you have active. That meant you could then deactivate all those shaders and simply use the LUT to achieve the same look. This is primarily to aid performance and make things very simple. 

NOTE: you shouldn’t use any bloom/fog/dof/mxao/sharpening-style effects when creating the LUT, only use colour and gamma/levels/curves-changing effects, then once the LUT is active you can add in those other effects as desired.

If you want to distribute a ReShade preset that uses any of these shaders, be sure to either direct users to download it direct from the link above, or include it in the download along with your preset file (the shaders are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license).

It’s always worth checking the Presentation section of the ReShade forum for any exciting shaders people create. There are quite a few that never get included with the main download. I use perhaps three or four regularly and they form staples of my presets.

Want to make your screenshot look like a painting? The new qUINT ADoF’s got you covered.

Settings as above (you can of course fiddle with them to suit). You must also add this to your preprocessor definitions in the settings tab (and hit reload afterwards):

ADOF_OPTICAL_VIGNETTE_ENABLE=1

I saw a post in my feed just about someone having problems with focusing DoF in ReShade. They’ve deleted their post now because they found an answer, but I’d written a reply so I figured it useful to share. It won’t make perfect sense because it was relating specifically to pictures they’d posted, but you should be able to follow the gist of it.

Summary of the problem: when the camera was pointing at a sim’s chest the background would be blurred, but when the camera was moved up to the sim’s face the background would be in focus and the blur was lost.

Okay so what you need to sort out is the focus. What’s happening is the point at which ReShade is looking for the focus changes as you move the camera.

For example, if you have non-mouse-driven auto-focus enabled and you have it set at screen coordinates 0.5, 0.5 that means whatever is directly in the centre of the screen will always be in focus, and whatever falls behind that (behind in terms of depth) point will be blurred.

So, his chest is quite a large target, and his face is a smaller target. Depending on where you have focus set to, it sounds like it could be just missing his face. The focus coordinates are falling on the background instead, meaning the background will be sharp and in focus.

A more specific example using your pictures: if the focus coordinates are set to 0.2, 0.4 then in the first picture that point falls around his right shoulder, meaning that’s the focus point and anything behind it will be blurred. But when you move the camera so his face is in view, 0.2, 0.4 now falls on the background, not on his face (the middle of his face would be something like 0.4, 0.6 - looking carefully, 0.5, 0.5 (which is default) might just be missing his neck at the place where it curves in).

You often have to experiment with different coordinates on a per-shot basis to get the right focus depending on where your subject is. You can enable mouse-driven auto-focus to make this a lot easier. As the name suggests, anywhere you point your mouse will be the subject of focus.