Does anyone else wonder why Maxon completely phased out Knoll Light Factory? A very basic version still exists in Maxon’s Red Giant Universe. Their latest lens flare tool nearly replaces KLF, but is still missing a key feature that truly made Knoll 3D Flare, a free extension to KLF, a true game-changer. K3DF was built upon a concept I came up with one night in a hotel in Boston while training the talented designers and producers at New England Sports Network.
I emailed Aharon at Red Giant Software the concept project I created that included some JavaScript code I borrowed from Dan Ebberts’ website MotionScript. Aharon responded quickly and said Red Giant wanted to pursue these features that I had built with the concept project. They knew Optical Flares was nearing completion and that it promised 3D features and multiple lights integration in Adobe After Effects.
When Aharon Rabinowitz, Dan Ebberts, and I were in the midst of working out features for Knoll 3D Flare during the Fall of 2009 we stumbled across a hidden gem. We weren’t sure if it was even possible, but Dan tinkered away with the code that turned out to not be that complex. The feature I’m talking about is 3D Obscuration. I am building an example of this now showing how a light can seamlessly be occluded and even inherit multiple layer RGB values and transparencies without any need for multiple instances. This feature saved hours of time. It felt like black magic or some kind of digital voodoo. Wink ; )
The best feature that we cooked up for Red Giant’s Knoll Light Factory continues to be omitted from Maxon’s Red Giant VFX Real Lens Flares. RLS surely delivers when it comes to rendering realistic lens flares and the lens schematic is super cool, but it’s rather sluggish just like Knoll Light Factory v3. Knoll Light Factory 2.7 was snappy, rendered quickly even in 16 and 32 bit mode in Adobe After Effects, and also acquired additional features with the free addition of Knoll 3D Flare.
We even beat Andrew Kramer’s Video Copilot to the punch. His impressive Optical Flares wasn’t available until January, 2010. We had finished up Knoll 3D Flare in the Fall of 2009. It still blows my mind that we designed, coded, and implemented major features in only one week. Near the end of that week we asked for one more feature seemingly on the surface to be too complicated to implement. Dan’s coding genius proved us wrong. I think he toiled with it for a couple of hours and had a working version by the end of the fourth day, Thursday. 3D Obscuration.
Now back to Real Lens Flares. Overall there are so many benefits even with the omission of 3D Obscuration. It’s not that uncommon for some features, no matter how powerful, to get cast aside. There was a feature in the original Knoll Lens Flare Pro called Spectacular. It allowed for flares to be auto-tracked onto Trapcode Particular particles. It was dropped when they updated the code because the rendering got much slower. When Knoll Light Factory reached v3 it was nearly unusable.
Assigning lights to flares is still buggy in RLF. It takes multiple tries to get it to work properly. When I created a new flare layer the Light option to track AE Lights assigned with a specific naming convention resulted in applying the flare to the wrong Light layer. Also rendering is rather slow which is one reason I’d bet why they dropped the 3D Obscuration checkbox feature from their final build. One last thing is that using my RTX 3090 on my Windows box gives me near real time feedback at full resolution. There used to be a checkbox in KLF for using GPU rendering.
I used Optical Flares for all of my custom flare work at NBA TV Design at Turner Broadcasting for six years, which was considerable. It was buggy and crashed a lot, but got the job done much faster than KLF3.
Now for the first time we have access to an accurate lens flare tool in Adobe After Effects. Knoll Light Factory, originally called Knoll Lens Flare Pro, has officially been replaced.
A few new features included are access to rendering in HDR and also ACES. This flare generator comes with heavy render times so Maxon included resolution options like “Production,” etc.
Real Lens Flares “Designer” interface closely resembles Knoll Light Factory, but with one exciting addition: a schematic view depicting the lenses used to create the flare.