[mwilchrlx]

I've noticed that scenes experience a strange dimming when the focus distance is set very close to the camera (2 and below). The only workaround is to render with a pinhole camera and try to do DOF in post, which is not as clean. What's the fix for this issue? (mult up scene and shader scale?)

Im curious as to the cause of this in general. Is it intentional/physically correct? If so, it's not very useful for someone trying to do macro scenes in motion at correct scale.

happy rendering,
thanks in advance,
Matt W.

[Mihai]

It's something that happens in real life, especially with macro lenses. The aperture is given for focus at infinity but as you focus closer the effective aperture changes giving you a darker image, because the lens moves farther away from the sensor for close focusing ability. I guess the "thin" lens in Maxwell works on this same principle in order to provide correct DOF, and maybe the only solution is either to move the camera target as far away as is possible for that shot while still maintaining the look, and/or scale up the scene 2x or more. The shading won't change that much if it's say a watch that's supposed to be 3cm in diameter and you scale it to 9cm and you can use a wider aperture to get back the same amount of blur as with the smaller sized scene.