Ghost in the Shell Wave

Made via heavy editing of the original footage using Blender Compositing, Shading, and Video Editing.

Blender Lens Emulation via Geometry Nodes

Above is the base geometry node setup for generating a single camera lens within blender. One can use the parameters of camera lenses to generate them within Blender and therefore emulate the look of shooting with such a camera including Bokeh!

Each of the lens parameters from the patent is passed into a group that generates the front and back profiles of the lens curve, then samples the top and bottom of each curve to draw two additional curves to connect those points.

From there, the curves are converted into a mesh so that overlapping vertices can be merged. Then the mesh is converted back into a curve, which gives us the profile of the top half of the lens, and a glass material with the IOR of our lens is applied to our geometry.

Afterward we can apply a screw modifier with a large number of sample points to our curve which will generate the geometry of our lens. Once this is done, we will want to look through our camera through the lens to check that the lens is converging/diverging our light appropriately. If not, simply select the flip normals option in the screw modifier, and the lens should work correctly from there.

There is a lot of tweaking involved once the lenses are created. Your camera needs to be placed behind the lenses at the point the sensor plate would normally sit. The camera needs to be in orthographic view. You need to build a camera body around the lenses and sensor plate (simple enough by creating a tube), and you have to create an aperture which is simply a disc with a hole in it.

THEN you have to play around with your depth of field settings, F-stop, your distance from your subject, and so many other camera settings (just like you would a real camera!) to get a nice photo. As you might expect, since we are using raytracing, you need to be in the Cycles render engine and have a large number of light bounces.