Depth of Field can be very tedious and painful to set up and generates slow renderings if you use the normal Camera DOF in the camera properties.

LightWave 7.0 introduced the Digital Confusion Depth of Field filter, which works as a post processing effect and it is very precise, smooth and renders very fast compared to the normal Camera DOF settings.

There is a very easy and convenient way to set up the Digital Confusion effect:

Create a Null object and name it as “Focus”.

Open the Digital Confusion panel:
Scene > Digital Confusion
or
Scene > Image Processing> Add Image Processing > Digital Confusion

In the Digital Confusion panel, define the Autofocus target and select the Null object called “Focus” (or the name you have assigned to).

In the Layout Scene, move the Null object “Focus” to the desired area you want the camera to be focused to, then select the F-Stop value, keeping in mind that the highest value the less DOF effect is achieved, the lowest value will blur all objects out of the “Focus” Null object (in front or behind the Null).

Try some quick renderings using Antialiasing set to Off since Digital Confusion works as a post-processing filter so it’s not Antialiasing dependant, although when you set up the final Antialiasing settings, the Digital Confusion Filter will work on every pass but don’t worry it is always faster and accurate than the Camera DOF.