"Set Focus Distance" Broken?

[trashcan]

I'm going through Remarkable Renderworks and have encountered some strange behavior. I noticed a similar issue when going through the other Renderworks tutorials and feel educated enough now to understand what's going on that leads to unexpected behaviors. 

 

I'm posting in the Rendering forum in case this is a use error, not a bug. Though, pretty sure this is a bug. 

 

Also posting this for posterity for other folks going through Render tutorials and getting weird results. 

Here's the exercise file:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/giixw4jb98wva5g/exercise-36.vwx?dl=0

 

I have my camera selected and active with an F-Stop of 1.4. In wireframe I click "Click to Set Focus Distance" and I select the vase in the foreground. My intention is to have a shallow DOF, focused on the foreground vase. I'm using the cropped perspective view as per the tutorial:

When I click the vase, the Focus Distance reads out as 19'8.982" when in fact it should read 3'4.139"

 

I know this because:

 

When using the "Set Focus Distance" from the camera view and it goes to that high wrong number and I switch to Final Quality, I get the wrong results, obviously:

 

When using the "Set Focus Distance" from the Top/Plan view I get an entirely different number of 4'10.096" - shouldn't this number always be the same or close to the same? In all instances I'm clicking the front of the blue vase. Here are the results I get when selecting the Focus Distance from Top/Plan:

 

When I manually put in the correct Focus Distance, I get the expected behavior - though the brightness is definitely incorrect. A change in focus distance should not change the brightness of a scene if all of the other settings remain the same... 

 

When I did it a second time, the focus and the brightness of the image were correct. Why's that? Because if you change the settings of a camera, sometimes you have to toggle its activation on and off in the Viz palette... This works as a solution to other render bugs by the way. If you find your renders aren't updating to from fast to final for some reason this appears to be a work-around for that bug too. 

 

Do any Vectorworks employees read this stuff? It's a little disheartening to find so many RW issues and not a peep from the Devs. 

 

[JuanP]

3 hours ago, trashcan said:

Do any Vectorworks employees read this stuff?

@trashcanYes, we do. Thanks for brining theses up. We are looking into these issues and we will get back to you ASAP. Could you share your email internally in case we need additional information? thanks