camera help
 

ok i have a glass oh water pouring into another glass and i have it animated and textured pretty good.. now i want to make it into a movie but i want to really focus on the water pouring out not on the background.. i want the background to be visible just maybe a little blury. heres a pic of the water being poured and i'd like the water to not be blury i think it might have to do with motion blur but im not sure..

What you're thinking of is "depth of field" commonly referred to as "Dof" and not motion blur. And looking at the particles, it seems like they're motion blurred already.

Dof can be simulated a few different ways. For the first two you will need to whip out Maya's distance measurement tool and get a reading from your camera to your subject(Create>Measure Tool >Distance Tool). Lets call that number X distance.

1. The Depth of field attribute on Maya cameras which is the most obvious way, but it's very dependent on your AA sampling in the render settings to eliminate any grain.

2. If you're using Mental Ray, you can plug either one of MR's dof shaders into one of the camera's lens shader slots - "physical_lens_dof" or "mia_lens_bokeh" ( I prefer this one).

The camera will need the X distance value so it knows where to focus, if you're using method 1. its the "focus distance" and for method 2, it would be the "Plane" attribute.

or

3. Render out z-depth pass or passes and use that to control a blurring filter in a compositing program.

thank you soo much i'll keep messing with it and see wat i can do and upload another pic later thanks again!!! :)

Since this is an animation, I'd recommend a depth pass (Genny's option 3) and composite it in another program (e.g. AE) if you have one.

stwert how i do this??

Create a new render layer and add all your objects to it. Open the attributes on the render layer (RMB > Attributes). Set the render layer preset to Luminance Depth. Follow the connections to setRange node. Break the connections on the Old Min and Old Max. Set values for these such that when you render, the foreground is nice and bright and the far objects are close to black (these values are distance from camera, which you can determine using the Object Details in the HUD). Hope that helps.

hmm im not sure i know wat to do here?? :/

Well, there's an excellent tutorial here: http://simplymaya.com/autodesk-maya-...=182&sub_cat=0 And that gives all the detailed steps, but since you might not want to spend money, I'd probably go with Genny's first solution. Only trouble is I haven't tried it that way, so best to look up Depth of Field in the Maya help.