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Tutorial/Asset: Quick Basic Flares (Patreon)

Published:
2023-11-22 04:00:31
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Just a quick experiment in trying to get the CG to match the live action a bit closer! Also a good reminder for me of the usefulness of render layers. It'd be fun to actually dive a bit deeper into lens flares at some point. Here's the assets I'm talking about in the video (quick flares/spotlights/haze ball for blender). You just have to target the constraint to the active camera. 

Files

LensFlares

Comments

michael w honsinger

HitFilm has amongst their extensive library of VFX, a lenses flare effect which has many controls for a plethora of variables. And it is free.

Found And Explained

I believe to hide the flare behind geometry there is a filter tap next to render and viewport toggles that can do shadows and obscure. So you can make the objects invisible but they can block lens flares if they move between the camera and the scene

tommy

you know what would be amazing,expanding on this concept and rebuilding video copilot plugin for blender, with the parallaxing particles and circles and optional elements. all triggered of the parented location and the camera position .oooooh yeah, i smell a nifty add on coming on.

Found And Explained

Link: https://artisticrender.com/10-new-or-hidden-features-in-blenders-outliner/ Click the funnel in the top right of the outlier, right next to the render options (hide in viewport, screen and hide in render) and you get a few more modes Holdout & indirect only: As far as I can tell, these only work in cycles. The holdout will make the pixels that make up the object transparent instead. Leaving a hole for composition effects. Indirect only will not render this object. Instead, it will render the effects this object has on other objects in the form of reflections and indirect lighting. Make the geo indirect in the view layer of the lens flares, and voila, it will hide the flares as it passes behind say a pillar without having to render said geo

Raffo VFX

Cool stuff Ian. I was wondering : why dont you like to use post process lens flares like the mentioned pack from videocopilot ?

Thijs Peeters

When you make it can you please put it in the discord?

3D CGI

Again amazing work! Thank you! BUT I’ve noticed that Lens flares die of quickly right befor they get out of the edge of the frame. So the beams get dimmer and darker when approaching the edge of the camera frame. In your very last shot they stayed. Do you have an idea how to fix that? Or just manually dim the the emission intensity at that point? <3

redishere

Great stuff as usual! My go-to lensflare process in Blender is the Flared add-on: it's only like 40 bucks, it's realtime, every lens artifact is actually located in 3D space and you can customize almost everything (streaks, color, occlusion, dirt, beams, ghosts etc)… but your method is so ingenious! It's super cool to be able to use a reference of your actual camera lens artifacts. Never thought of that. I'm definitely gonna test this a lot!

J McNulty

Could you not render the flare layer with an orthographic camera at the same location as the perspective camera to remove the perspective distortion along the flare render pass?

Robin Ruud

I've actually made this, but I've never shared it because the technique has some issues. Having a bunch of planes in a 3D scene never seemed to me to be a particularly robust workflow.

Robin Ruud

Awesome, Ian! A lot of your challenges are very fixable with geometry nodes. Just like you suspected. Honestly, I think you'd get comfortable with it pretty quickly. It might be like the view layers; seems complicated for a little bit until you find some easy workflows with it.

Carter Burr-Kirven

Yeah, but the problem is that that isn't how lens flares work: they happen inside the lens, as a result of a visible light source. So a bright object will get a flare, complete with glow, spikes, horizontal streaks, ghosting, whatever, and that flare will dim and disappear as the light source passes behind something (thus shrinking and vanishing, from the POV of the camera), but the flare elements themselves—spikes, streaks, glow—will remain visible on top of everything, since they're happening inside the camera. You'd never want to have a flare partially occluded as though it's some kind of glowing spike ball hovering inside the scene (Except that one shot in Transformers 2, where they probably tried it a million ways before giving up and making the call). (And also, Indirect Only would make the object invisible to direct rays, which includes the ones from the camera, so yes, it would indeed be invisible, meaning it would be incapable of occluding anything, flares included)

Sergei Sarichev

awesome as always Ian! any chance you will be sharing some mocaps ? :)) geting decent anims is such a big bottle neck

Loïc Bramoullé

There is Flare wizzard that's basically optical flare for blender, with nice features like putting empties in a collection to generate the flares, colection for obscuring ect...

Found And Explained

I stand corrected you are completely right. Thanks for that!

Clint Shelton

Thanks Ian! Now stop overthinking.

Stephan

loved the video! ty ian! agh render layers, glad to hear im not the only one that avoided them. i appreciate having that process in the video here..

bonzairob

For obscuring the flares, i wonder if you could render a depth map and do something like a greater-than followed by multiply, to create a mask/factor for the flare layer... Render layers seem to be underused generally in blender, games use offscreen renders all the time for this kind of thing!