Lil’ Coffee Breakdown: All Motion Blur and Depth of Field was added in After Effects.

I realize that the title here is a bit bold, but in my case (and possibly) yours, this is very true. I ran into a fellow artist who at an event who pleaded with me to cover this issue. This artist did not have a giant render farm, nor did he have a multi-GPU setup using Octane. He simply wanted to know the correct workflow for doing Depth of Field and Motion Blur in After Effects. A method that didn’t result in artifacts or other anomalies. So, as I promised, here it is.

“A WHOLE tutorial about the Depth Pass?”

Yes and no. This tutorial is about saving a TON of render time by NOT having to render your Depth of Field and Motion Blur in C4D’s Physical Renderer. With a couple of After Effect plugins and the correct workflow, you can save yourself potentially hours of rendering.

What you will learn:

• How to add Motion Blur and Depth of Field to your C4D render in After Effects
• What is needed out of a Depth Pass to achieve proper results with Frischluft Lenscare
• What a “Position” pass or WPP is and how it can be used to generate a correct Depth pass
• How to set up a multi-layer EXR output for After Effects
• How to properly set up your After Effects comp with Frischluft Depth of Field and RSMB plugins (see links below)

Tools you’ll need:

• Cinema 4D R15 or Higher
• After Effects CC
• Frischluft Lenscare 
• Real Smart Motion Blur or RSMB by Re:Vision

Let’s Get to the Tutorial*

* So Ihab in the comments found a mistake, so thanks Ihab! Looks like I grabbed the regular RSMB plugin and not the Pro Vector version which reads your vector pass. Sorry about that folks. Grabbing this Pro Vector version and choosing your vector pass will give you more accurate motion blur results.