Rendering: add options for depth of field or "some sort of" depth buffer output

[luuude]

Hi! Would it be possible to render this with depth of field or render out a pass with z-depth to exr? Like if the splats know where they are in z the could just be colored lighter or darker depending on where the they sit in z depth? This could be useful for doing compositing in Nuke.

[aras-p]

It's not exactly clear how to do it "prioperly" (since gaussian splats are semitransparent by definition, and "depth buffer" out of transparent things is a somewhat contradictory thing). It should be possible to implement something towards that, somehow. Someday.

[luuude]

Yeah I know what you mean. In most scenes I would guess that it works ok for mild dof effects and could be nice to add a little bit of atmosphere. The best would probably be to just render the effect directly with a defocus type blur but that would probably be quite heavy and not realtime? For nuke the best would be a renderer indide of nuke with Deep output. A man can dream eh? Thanks for making this open btw! Its great to be able to play around with it.

[aras-p]

As a super cheap hack that might or might not work, could be to try scaling the splat sizes based on DoF focus amount. Whether this would work at all is probably left to be seen, but should be easy to try.