Camera focus?

I apologize if this has been asked before…or would be better in another forum. I searched the help and forum and couldn’t find any answer. I’m very new to toon boom, in a scene I need the camera to go in and out of focus, is that possible? I have the camera movement working, but as it moves I need the it to transition from blurry to clear. Thanks!

Nope.

Because TBS is a basic vector based program, it doesn’t offer any kind of blur effect. You’d have to render out your levels seperately and perform the effect in a compositing software like After Effects or some such.

The newest version of Flash has a blur function, it’s a bit tricky at first if you’re new to that program but it’ll do the job well. If you’ve got money to burn, TB’s Solo has many special effects options, including blur. Good luck with your project!

Cheers,

Burton.

raven,
while TBS doesn’t have a blur effect, I would think you could manufacture something like what you want by getting creative with the color transform effect. You might not get a perfect result, but I’d be curious to see what you could achieve by making a rectangle as big or bigger than your camera’s FOV, then with the color transform effect add some very light blues & greys with very low alpha’s. While it won’t actually “blur” anything, by playing with them a little you could might be able to make a “warped glass” look. I don’t know the final result you’re after, but that may be good enough to create the illusion anyway. Of course, I can’t very well tell you how to do all that, & I don’t even know that its possible. But it seems reasonable & worth a try. I might even do it myself just to see & learn something.
Good luck, let us know how you resolve the issue

That’s a great suggestion Pat. Additionally you can add a slightly shifted translucent version of the “in focus” layer to help in distortion of the image below along with the color transform haze you suggested. You then can animated both the transform haze and the alpha and position of the translucent duplicate layer to get the effect of the blurred image pulling into focus. This technique is also valuable when trying to produce depth of field effects where some things are crisp in focus and other things in the same frame are out of focus. A great way to manipulate the viewer’s attention toward important characters or objects. Let us know how your tests work out. -JK

Just last night I was pressing the “slow” button on the Tivo to better analyze a depth of field effect on TV.

While the addition of blur would really sell the effect, I don’t think it’s impossible to achieve the look you’re after without it. In addition to the alpha/duplication method that Pat and JK mention, I think if you spent some time on pseudo lighting effects it would help as well. For example, any surface that’s reflecting bright light should have a hexagonal low alpha lens flare, that, as it’s coming into focus, would slowly rotate and shrink until it disappears. This would be on top of the alpha/duplication layers.

I hope to spend some time on this particular puzzle soon, to achieve the most convincing effect possible in Toon Boom.

Sounds like a great future Calico Monkey blog tutorial. -JK