Ray Tracing from the Ground Up

Chapter 10

Depth of Field

Image courtesy of Tania Humphreys

Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you should:

• understand how depth of field is simulated in ray tracing;
• have implemented a thin-lens camera.

The depth of field of a camera is the range of distances over which objects appear to be in focus on the film. A photographer can set the depth of field of a real camera by adjusting the camera lens. In contrast, everything is in focus with the pinhole camera we modeled in Chapter 9 because the “lens” is infinitely small. Real cameras have finite-aperture lenses that only focus perfectly at a single distance called the focal distance. I’ll ...