Enhancing Realism Part 1:
Techniques for Adding Depth of Field and Separation To Vue Scenes

To achieve greater realism, especially with human character renderings, it's important to create a sense of space between the character and the surrounding scene.  There are two ways of accomplishing this: Adjusting the Depth of Field by blurring the scene background and/or creating a halo of light behind the figure to give it the illusion of separation from the background.  The techniques listed below accomplish this by using a backdrop plane and a point light.
Here is a simple render of a SkinVue'd character using a flat black background.  Not too interesting, although the dark background does provide good contrast with our foreground character, so it provides a slight sense of depth.

 

 Let's use a common technique employed by studio portrait photographers by adding a grey colored backdrop plane behind the character and shine a low powered point light on the plane that is positioned behind the figure but in front of the plane.  Make sure to set the backdrop plane to not cast or receive shadows.

Now we're getting a much greater feeling of depth and separation and a more life-like appearance. 

Now, load a bitmap into the backdrop plane or add a slight amount of fractal bump.  This provides an even greater life-like appearance because of the varying contrast in the background.
Here's an example with the character posed against a picture, alpha plane type background. The point light is shut off in this case because the picture itself provides the necessary separation.  While the separation of this render is quite good, it lacks a sense of depth.
Here's the same picture with a simple Gaussian blur applied to the background.  Notice how much greater the sense of depth is in this render versus the previous, non-blurred render.  The Gaussian blur was done in Photoshop and then reloaded into the background plane.  You could also accomplish this by setting up a rendered blur in Vue by adding a blur factor to the camera and playing with the cameral focal point.  However, this slows rendering time considerably.
Depth Maps

Another way to generate a blurred DOF is to use the Depth Map feature in Vue.  After rendering your image, save the Depth Map in addition to the color render.  In your image program (e.g. Photoshop), use the Depth Map as a mask layer to generate the blur.  The white areas (e.g. the background) will receive 100% blur while the dark areas (e.g. the foreground) will receive little to no blur.