BLENDER ADD-ON · CAMERA

Autofocus

Let the camera find the focus.

Stop keying the focus distance by hand. Tick one box and your camera focuses on the nearest surface around the center of the frame, like a real camera, in the viewport and in the render.

One checkbox  ·  Nine focus points  ·  Bake to keyframes

Captured in Blender's viewport, with the add-on's markers hidden.

01 · FOCUS

Move the camera. The focus keeps up.

The add-on reads what the camera sees at the center of the frame and at eight points around it. The nearest surface wins, like the focus zones of a real camera. You animate the shot, without placing a target or keying a distance.

02 · FOLLOW

A card flies at the lens. The focus takes it, then lets it go.

Rack focus happens on its own, from one surface to the next, across the whole shot. Set the camera's F-Stop as usual: this is Blender's own depth of field, in Cycles and in EEVEE.

03 · SENSOR

Choose how wide the camera looks.

Radius sets how far the eight points sit from the center. A wide sensor catches anything near the middle of the frame. At 0 it only looks at the exact center. Small spheres show where each point lands, so you see what the camera is reading, and they stay out of the render.

04 · TIMING

Decide how fast it reacts and how softly it moves.

Delay is how long a new surface must stay in sight to take the focus, so something crossing the frame does not steal it. Smoothing is how slowly the focus glides there. It eases in and out and never overshoots.

05 · CONTROLS

Everything fits in one small panel.

It sits in the camera's properties, next to the depth of field settings you already know. These are the defaults, a good place to start.

06 · BAKE

Bake it, and the file renders anywhere.

Bake to Keyframes writes the focus on every frame, from the camera's first keyframe to its last. Any single frame then renders the same, and the render no longer needs the add-on, which is what a render farm wants. Changed your mind? Clear Bake goes back to live autofocus.

In our tests, a sequence rendered live and the same sequence rendered baked came out pixel-identical, in Cycles and in EEVEE.

07 · WHY NOT A FOCUS OBJECT

One subject, Blender is enough. Many subjects, it is a lot of keys.

If your shot stays on one object, Blender's Focus Object does the job for free. This add-on is for shots where what should be sharp keeps changing.

BLENDER 4.4+  ·  TESTED ON 5.2 LTS  ·  EEVEE AND CYCLES  ·  GPL

Let the camera find the focus.

Autofocus for Blender, $12.
Free updates for version 1.x.