Partial fix for hair grooms with shallow depth of field in Unreal 5.4 (see description)

NEW UPDATE JULY 6, 2024: Im trying to “fix” shallow depth of field with metahuman hair and fur in Unreal 5.4.
I thought i had solved it, using a fast process of exporting the background and character separately. But it only works on daylight scenes - well, it works on those because the DirLight is the only light source affecting the character. So the character looks fine when rendered by itself.
The process “breaks” with more complex lighting and GI and reflections. The character doesnt get those, so looks wrong. And i cant find a way to have hidden objects properly affect global illumination, reflection, etc. Only shadows are possible.
OLD DESCRIPTION JULY 2:
This 718 frame scene rendered fast (2 mins!!), and I render two passes - bg and chatacter. Then combine in Premiere or After Effects or Da Vinci Resolve or Nuke etc - which takes another few mins.
Please ignore the character animation - it’s awful 😂 I just did it quickly to force the hair grooms to move in a certain way.
And the “quickly moving” point light is for testing purposes.
This scene is from the fine folks at PropHaus btw.
The trees haven’t been upgraded to MegaScans trees but if anyone wants to do a scene like this I’d recommend that! ;)

[@cgartist1447]

yes looks promising! really interesting) 👍👍 well done!

[@Maruk81]

❤❤❤ wheres the tutorial?

[@virtualfilmer]

I’m working on it don’t worry! :) thanks for watching!

[@Maruk81]

@@virtualfilmer im to waithing