Lens Flares for Fusion
Over the past few weeks I have written some Fusion plugins to draw lens flares. They are to a large degree a coding exercise, but they helped me out in one case already and every time you don’t have to switch to After Effects or Fusion’s 32bit version to use plugins like Knoll or Video Copilot’s Optical Flares for simple stuff is a productivity gain. This is an example that I recreated from a reference photograph (search for ‘lens flare’ on google images to find it).
There are three Fuses that are meant to be combined:
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| FlareCircle draws a single reflection of a lens flare. It’s designed after Nuke’s flare node so you can use it to really mimic an existing flare in your plate with chromatic aberration. It also provides additional position and angle outputs that you can use to track in your own lens artifacts. | FlareStar draws the center of lens flares or star-shaped glints that can be positioned anywhere in your picture. | FlareMulti draws multiple circles with random radius, hue and brightness. Instead of fading when the light source leaves the frame, the circles will vanish one after another. No need for tedious hand animation. |
All three Fuses support an occlusion mask to hide the whole thing as well as multiple merge modes (additive, screen, max/lighten). Get them on Vfxpedia! If you find them useful or have suggestions, drop me a line.
Update August 2012: The Fuses now fully support DoD.
Tags: Fusion
