Free Lens kernels

Have you noticed on high end productions how the defocus on the cg looks more real and detailed? A big part of what achieves that is using a lens kernel to drive the look of your defocus rather than having your chosen defocus node’s standard circular shape.

The reason why is because most defocus nodes aren’t adding any of the nice details in the bokeh shapes that you’d get with a real lens, just swapping in a lens kernel into the filter input of a defocus node allows you to achieve a more realistic looking defocus.

So if you want to create realistic looking defocus in nuke a big part of it is down to using a lens kernel in the filter input of your defocus node.