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######## Welcome to Aperture - Autofocus in Blender! #########

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Thanks for checking out my Aperture plug-in :-) 

Here is the official documentation. I think you'll find it very intuitive to use regardless.

######## Getting started #########

1. Installing Aperture is as easy as installing any Blender plug-in. Simply go to Edit -> Preferences -> Add-ons -> Install and navigate to the .py file

2. After installing, find Aperture in the 3D view toolbar, by pressing N

######## Basic usage #########

1. Choose your preferred render method from the drop-down box. The default will be centre point

2. If you would like a different region, and would like to preview it, simply press "preview focus region". This will create a render border around the exact portion of this scene that will be focused on

3. If you would like a custom Focus region, select "custom" from the drop-down box, and then draw a render border around the exact region you would like to focus on. You can do this by pressing ctrl-B, and then drawing a bounding box around the region you would like to focus on

4. Click "bake autofocus" before you render to apply the autofocus

######## Advanced usage #########

1. Tick "advanced mode" to access the various advanced features of Aperture

2. "strategy" decides what to focus on within the chosen focus region. For example, the default of "mean" will focus on the mean distance within your focus region

3. "maximum speed" decides the maximum speed that the camera can focus at. Great for achieving a realistic, slow, focus pull. By default, this will be 0, meaning no maximum speed, but you can set it as desired. The lower this number is, the slower the focus pulling will be. This is measured in scene units per frame. 

4. "time smoothing" is another method for smoothing and slowing your focus pulls to look more natural. This slows down your focus pulling by focusing on the average distance over the last few frames. By default, with the value 1, there will be no time smoothing as it will only look at the previous 1 frame, but the higher this value is, the pants lower the focus will change 

5. "sampling rate" is a measure of how far apart depth samples are. Higher values will move these further apart, reducing the number of samples, and speeding up your break. Be Careful, as small changes to this value will produce large effects on bake time.

######## FAQs #########

Weird stuff is happening and I have a focus object as well as using Autofocus Pro. What gives?

If you want to use Autofocus Pro to focus a camera, you can’t use this in conjunction with a “Focus Object”. This is just because of the way Blender works - if you have a Focus Object, this will override the focus distance which is calculated by “Bake Autofocus”.

######## Thoughts? #########

Have any issues/suggestions? Post them on the official pages: 

• The official GitHub support page
• The official Blender Artists thread