I have been thinking about a dream like blurring for a while and here is what I came with after playing with the idea last night. This is 100% pure Vue - especially the 'blur' effect. I will keep working on it for an entry for this month's challenge. In the meantime, I will let you guess how I did this :) If anyone wants to know, I will do some kind of tutorial about it.

eeeeuwwwww.... nicely done! and we all know it's that 'vaseline smeared on a pane of glass' camera trick! ;D

More to the point it looks more like a "bumpy pane of glass" in front of the camera ;o). Laurie

Well it did come out blurry, but boy what a great effect. Nice thinking and work. Sharen

Yes! Give us a tutorial! This is a wonderful effect, it gives a lot of dimension that the usual sharp-focus lacks. Nice work, Laurent! :D

The effect looks great, agiel. I'm sure you were trembling with the mouse when moving the woman and then shaked the computer while rendering. Both behaving gives wonderful effects, just try ;-) Guitta

Well... I tried to use vaseline on the camera but all it did was to mess up my keyboard and blur my monitor :) More seriously.. the trick applies the vaseline screen / bumpy glass to what is available in Vue. A full tutorial will follow... for now, here is a quick summary : 1- Place your camera inside a sphere 2- Give the sphere a simple glass material. 3- Adjust the refraction of the glass to tune the distortion of the glass. Add some bump if you want... I kept mine smooth. 4- Edit transparencies of the material. I set 'blurred transparencies' to (1'). Select 'Variable transparencies' and edit the transparency function (I took 'pitted surface' int the 'bumps' directory). 5- Next to the black and white preview of variable transparency, you have a filter for 'transparency' and a filter for 'blur'. First adjust the 'transparency' filter to select which area of the image you want to blur. By default, transparent areas will be blurred and opaque areas will be sharp. 6- When you are satisfied, copy the 'transparency' filter (right click menu -> copy) and paste it into the 'blur' filter (right click meny -> paste). 7- Edit the 'transparency' filter function (right click menu again -> edit) and set the filter to a maximum saturation. 8- This should disable the transparency and leave you with only the variable blur. It took me a while to get the exact effect I wanted but that was worth it. Have fun...

That's pretty cool, and I wouldn't have thought to try it. Thanks for the tip!