Hasta La Motion!

I have a problem that I have been messing with for a while and haven’t found a fully acceptable solution across the board. There may not be one.

When producing Maya renders I have found it extremely difficult to nail down a good pipeline for motion blur and DOF. I usually prefer to render with Mental Ray. It has better anti-aliasing, filters, outputs and the obvious additions of GI and Final Gather. However, the motion blur and DOF renders are murder on render times! The sampling rates go through the roof if I want a nice smooth render. Maya software seems to handle DOF as a post effect and is beautifully smooth for almost no additional cost to the render. But its maya software. MS motion blur is pretty crappy as well.

I have experimented with motion vector passes and Depth passes to use in compositing and have received mixed results. When using the mr passes system to output motion vectors I get weird results as 3D objects pass in front of one another moving different directions. I have briefly used Toxic and RSMB for AE. Would using something like Nuke handle MV passes better?

Also the Lens blur filter in AE is decent, but pretty slow as well.

What are the processes you all use to achieve DOF and Motion Blur that doesn’t totally swallow up chunks of time and resources?

Thanks all!

Brad