Depth of Field
Cinematic camera focus blur
Also known as: DoF · Bokeh
Definition
Depth of field (DoF) is the post-process that simulates a camera lens focusing on one distance and blurring everything closer or farther. Cinematic DoF with shaped bokeh sells "this is a movie shot," while a subtle DoF nudge separates a character from the background. It is a render-budget item — high-quality DoF samples a lot of pixels — so games usually only enable strong DoF in cinematics or vehicle scopes.
In production
DoF uses a configurable focal distance, aperture (f-stop), and blade count that in Unreal Engine 5 can be tuned per-camera through the Post Process Volume or Cine Camera Actor settings. Cinematic DoF with shaped, hexagonal bokeh sells "this is a movie shot" during cutscenes, while a subtle DoF nudge on gameplay cameras separates a character from a busy background without the player consciously noticing the blur. It is a real render-budget item — high-quality DoF requires sampling many neighboring pixels per fragment to build a convincing bokeh shape, and UE5's Circle DoF method costs meaningfully more than its cheaper Gaussian DoF fallback — so games usually reserve strong DoF for cinematics, photo modes, or vehicle scope/sniper-zoom states rather than running it at full strength during normal gameplay. A common pitfall is UI elements bleeding into the blurred background plane because they weren't excluded from the DoF pass via a separate render layer.
