OVERVIEW

A real camera body inside Blender

DSLR AutoFocus Pro brings real camera autofocus behavior to Blender — modeled after Fujifilm's dual-axis AF system. Instead of hand-keyframing focus distance, let the addon handle it the way a real camera body would: pick your AF mode, point at your subject, and watch focus pull naturally.

Choose your AF behavior (Single-shot, Continuous, or Manual) and your AF area (Single Point, Zone, Wide/Tracking, or All) — just like switching modes on a real camera. Every combination works.

Focus transitions are computed in diopter space — the way physical lens motors actually move — so a near-to-far rack pulls smoothly across the whole range instead of snapping.

New in 1.7: Auto Exposure meters what the camera sees and rides exposure the way a live-view camera does — pan into a bright window and the frame blows out, holds for a beat, then settles. When you're happy with the result, bake focus and exposure to keyframes for a render that matches the viewport exactly.

FEATURES

Key features

AUTO EXPOSURE

Blow-out, hold, settle

A live-view camera never adjusts instantly. It meters, decides, then moves — so a pan from a dark room into daylight blows out, holds for a moment, and settles. Cameras close down faster than they open up, because clipped highlights are an unambiguous signal and shadow noise is not. Auto Exposure models exactly that: a reaction delay, then an exponential approach with separate timing for each direction — the time-dependent adaptation model from perceptual tone-mapping research (Pattanaik et al. 2000, Krawczyk et al. 2005).

🎞️ Bake once, retune instantly

Bake meters every frame once and caches it on the camera, then writes exposure keyframes. Re-bake reuses the cache — switch preset, Strength, EV limit or compensation and get a new curve in milliseconds, with no re-rendering.

🔦 Works in EEVEE and Cycles

In Cycles scenes the meter reads your lighting through a small Material Preview viewport (Scene Lights + Scene World) — one click on Set Up Metering Viewport creates it for you. EEVEE scenes need nothing extra.

FOCUS BOUNCE

Four motors, four feels

When a lens locks focus, the motor doesn't stop dead — it overshoots and settles. Each preset bundles physically correlated frequency, decay, and envelope values modeled after a real motor type. Hit Test Bounce to preview the character without racking focus.

VIEWPORT

AF overlay in camera view

AF-S · Single Point — One precise focus bracket. Lock on exactly what matters.

ALL mode — Every AF point active. Full viewport coverage for automatic subject detection.

AF-C · Zone M · Locked — Green grid shows locked focus points. Status bar displays mode, distance, and target object in real time.

LIVE DEMO

In action

AF-C · Zone M — Continuous autofocus with real-time depth of field transitions as the camera moves through the scene.

Smooth rack focus — Watch the depth of field shift as the diopter-space engine tracks across the scene.

INTERFACE

Clean professional UI

Left: AF-S Single Point — precision controls with Pick/Center point selection. Right: AF-C Zone M — continuous mode with live status, distance, and object info.

Everything lives in one sidebar tab: Focus · Transition & Lens Effects · Auto Exposure · Keyframe Bake · Viewfinder Overlay · AF Area Modes · Utilities. Help text is one click away with the ? in the panel header.

AF SYSTEM

Mode combinations

STATUS

Focus indicators

SPECIFICATIONS

Details

VIDEO

In motion

CHANGELOG

Version history

v1.5.5 — Additive Camera Layer

🎚️ Lens Breathing Is Now Additive

Breathing no longer takes ownership of your focal length — it is composed on top of whatever you authored: a static value, a keyframed zoom, or a slider you move while AF runs. Previously a zoom animation froze while AF was active; now zoom and breathing coexist, and the panel tells you when a zoom animation is detected.

📐 Ratio-Based Breathing Model

Breathing is physically a percentage change of angle of view, so it is now a ratio instead of a millimetre offset. A fixed 1.2 mm offset used to be a 5% breath at 24 mm but only 1.7% at 70 mm; the character no longer changes across a zoom range. Calibration is unchanged at 50 mm — existing projects look exactly the same.

🎬 Non-Destructive Bake & Driver Safety

Your zoom and focus curves are carried through the bake and stashed with full handle and interpolation data — Clear Bake restores them. If the lens is driver-controlled, breathing steps aside instead of fighting it. Also fixed: breathing lost between frames during playback, and float precision drift over long sessions. Blender 4.x and 5.x action layouts both supported.

v1.5.4 — Streamlined UI & Bounce Polish

🧩 Keyframe Bake Now Inline

The Keyframe Bake controls moved out of a separate sub-panel and into the main panel as a collapsible inline section — fewer clicks, everything in one place.

🐛 Critical Bounce Fixes

Fixed an AF-S settle-timer bug that broke bounce animation after the diopter refactor. Added direction-aware overshoot (the motor overshoots in the direction of travel), a raised-cosine release window that removes the residual snap at envelope end, and frame-rate-independent residual decay so bounce looks identical at any viewport frame rate.

v1.5.2 – v1.5.3 — Bounce Preset System

🎬 Four Motor-Modeled Presets

Focus bounce now ships with four named presets, each bundling physically correlated frequency, decay, and envelope values modeled after a real lens motor: Modern (STM/Linear, ~5 Hz), Natural (USM/DDSSM, ~4 Hz), Cinematic (cine servo, ~3.5 Hz — default), and Vintage (1980s–90s DC motor, ~2.5 Hz).

🎚️ Custom Mode + Test Bounce

A new Custom mode exposes individual frequency, decay, envelope, and amplitude sliders for full manual control. The Test Bounce button previews the selected bounce character instantly — no need to rack focus to feel the difference.

v1.5.1 — Physics Engine Overhaul

🔬 Diopter-Space Focus Engine — Complete Rewrite

The focus interpolator now operates in diopter space (1/distance) rather than linear distance, matching how real DSLR/mirrorless AF motors actually move. This fixes the long-standing "instant focus" feel on near→far rack focus pulls. Where the old linear lerp put focus at 7m within 17ms of a 1m→50m pull, the new engine places it at 1.14m — a smooth, even pull through the entire range. Reference: thin lens equation, U.S. Patent 4,816,859, real-world non-linear focus ring travel.

🎯 Focus Bounce — Recalibrated for Visibility

Bounce parameters retuned toward the cinematic end of real servo behavior so each oscillation is perceivable to the human eye. A strict 5 Hz physical bounce reads as "instant blur" on screen — the new 3.5 Hz tuning shows ~1.9 visible cycles. Bounce fires at lens settle (servo brake), not at command issue — physically correct timing.

🌫️ Recalibrated Lens Breathing

Previous breathing coefficient produced exaggerated FOV changes (up to ±20%). Modern cine and stills lenses typically show ~5%. Coefficient retuned ×4.0 → ×1.5, clamp ±20% → ±10%. Now matches the breathing curve of real modern lenses.

🛡️ Fixed: Past-Infinity Bounce Glitch

A new relative amplitude cap keeps bounce excursion ≤ 50% of the settle diopter, preventing far-focus bounces from snapping to the far-distance ceiling — while remaining visible across all focus ranges (1m through 50m+).

v1.1 — Lens Effects Overhaul & Modern EVF HUD

Lens Breathing — Complete Rewrite

New infinity-referenced physics model with adaptive low-pass filter. Breathing is now clearly visible during rack focus — the FOV shifts as focus pulls between near and far subjects. The adaptive filter kills AF-C micro-jitter while letting real focus transitions through instantly. Bake now keyframes cam.lens alongside focus_distance when breathing is enabled.

Modern EVF Viewport Overlay

Overlay rewritten to match modern mirrorless viewfinders (Sony α7R V, Fujifilm X-T5, Canon R5). Dark shadow outlines on every AF bracket for readability on any background. Proportional sizing — AF points scale with the camera frame. Info bar anchored to the bottom of the camera frame with a three-section layout.

v1.0 — Initial Release

Full dual-axis AF system (AF-S, AF-C, MF × Single Point, Zone S/M/L, Wide/Tracking S/M/L, All). Viewport overlay with 4 point styles and status color coding. Smooth focus transitions with speed presets. Lens breathing & bounce effects. One-click keyframe bake with step control. Focus peaking for manual mode. Blender 4.0–5.0 compatible.

⚙️ This addon controls focus distance, the camera lens when breathing is enabled, and Color Management ▸ Exposure when Auto Exposure is on. It does not change any other render settings.

🔄 Autofocus and Auto Exposure auto-pause during render and resume after it completes.

📩 Contact me via messages for support or feature requests.

© Skettch · DSLR AutoFocus Pro · 2026

DSLR AutoFocus Pro 1.7.0