What is mostly in my thoughts recently when it comes to rendering is real time depth of field effect. I intend to read state of the art material on the matter and hopefully post a well formed summary, just like I did for physically based rendering, but until then I thought I would list a few resources already.

• A discussion on Pouët on bokeh effects
• An article by Angelo Pesce (with code sample) on the combination of DoF and motion blur
• A discussion (see the comments) on the same blog, about ideas to implement DoF
• The slides (in Japanese) of a talk by Masaki Kawase, covering among other topics, a separable bokeh depth of field
• In their SIGGRAPH 2011 course, DICE also presented a separable bokeh depth of field, which I haven’t read yet, but looks very similar to Kawase’s one
• Matt Pettineo also discussed a few approaches to fake bokeh.

That’s all for now. ;-)

Update: after further documentation, both Kawase’s  and DICE’s techniques indeed rely on the idea of creating an hexagon shaped bokeh by decomposing it into three skewed boxes, but while Kawase’s approach uses seven passes, DICE’s one takes it down to two passes thanks to some clever use of multirender targets.

Also, I forgot to mention a second article of Matt Pettineo, where he suggests a combination of techniques to achieve a better result.

An example of actual bokeh in a photo of mine