Having some fun with Real Lens Flares. This street sign in my neighborhood seemed appropriate as a backdrop for Maxon’s latest incarnation of lens flare tools. Like most of us I’ve added glints to many a comp. In most cases the look of the flare had nothing technically tying it into the shot. The Creative Director would just say: “make it look cool, think Transformers.”
This lens flare lab gives folks the ability to add realistic flares that will match the lenses from their shoot, not just visually striking, but accurate as well. I know a bit about photography, but was a bit intimidated by Real Lens Flares at first. I felt I needed to take a Masters-level course on cameras and lenses in order to accurately match my footage. Maybe they’ll add the ability to do automatic camera lens matching.
Technically these three examples aren’t “correct,” but they looked good to me so I ran with it. Currently there are no 3D tools built into the engine like Knoll Light Factory. If one wants to make these flares 3D then head on over to Dan Ebbert’s site. That’s where I borrowed some code for the concept project I made for what became Knoll 3D Flare for Red Giant Software 14 years ago.
Anamorphic update, March 29, 2023: In the latest Maxon One update anamorphic flares have been added to the presets for Real Lens Flares. This fairly new tool can be found under the RG VFX set of tools in After Effects. They’ve added auto-anamorphic options as well, aiding the user to design and build anamorphic flares of their own. I’m still hoping they will add 3D features similar to those in Knoll Light Factory like After Effects light-linking, camera support, and obscuration options.
3D flares update, as of the latest Maxon One update in November 2023: Real Lens Flares now supports 3D positional and light linking options. However, I could not find any obscuration controls for 3D and RGB Obscuration as found in Knoll Light Factory via the Knoll 3D Flare addition in 2009.
Another 3D flares update as of March, 2024: Real Lens Flares now supports obscuration controls, but is still not complete 15 years later.
One of the best features of Knoll 3D Flare (K3DF) that Red Giant Software gave away for free in 2009 were the included professional obscuration controls.
When the three of us were designing K3DF the last requests made by myself and Aharon Rabinowitz to Dan Ebberts was to add true 3D Obscuration that also supported RGB Color Tinting of the flare allowing the flare’s color to be influenced by all of the layers obscuring the flare as they stacked up in Z space.
Dan delivered in a huge way! He allowed for multiple layers obscuring the flare’s line of sight to the camera to additively build up and combine their colors and transparency values.
For K3DF Dan added the code so that all 3D layers’ alphas and RGB values combined within 3D space in After Effects which allowed the lights/flares to move amidst them in X, Y, and Z space without the need for making holdout mattes, usually precomps, for each layer as they obscured the lights/flares. It truly simplified the obscuration process where, for instance, a comp had a dozen or more 3D layers with animated lights and/or animated cameras. This process was just a check box. Turn it on and enjoy the magic! I was able to drop a light into a scene and move it in, around, and even through a tunnel of dozens of 3D layers with no matte world involved.
Based on the current sluggishness of Real Lens Flares on my system running an RTX 3090 (where’s GPU support?) this may be a telling sign as to why they aren’t adding true 3D Obscuration yet supporting additive 3D layer tinting and transparency influence and light color linking options. K3DF took a week to design and code by three people trying to stay ahead of the release of Video Copilot’s Optical Flares. This time there’s no real rush for Real Lens Flares, and maybe that’s a good thing considering it is rendering highly realistic flares based on actual real world data compared to the artistic flares of old. Either way I’m still looking forward to seeing what they cook up next at Maxon.