Inspired by JJ Abram’s ridiculous liberal use of lens flare in Star Trek, I’ve been messing with flares on my own time. Using a basic dSLR and with various lenses at different aperture settings…
Canon EF 100mm F2 @ F22
EF 50mm F1.4
You’ll notice the shape of the flare is very different for different lenses, and also the aperture size(F-stop setting) plays a big part in defining the shape of the flare as well. In general, large f-number(F22) gives a more defined star-burst shape to the flare, while a small f-number (F1.4) gives a softer looking flare.
Anamorphic lens flares, which looks ‘cooler’ in my opinion, are harder to reproduce on a regular consumer camera because they require special anamorphic lenses.
Do you think there’s a way to improve blenders lenses flares?
I think people are working on improving it for the Sintel project. We’ll probably see some really cool looking flares soon!
Ha, I wonder how many of those google image ana flares are real?! Thats the hard thing today, getting acurate reference, in this cause I thank you, any chance of adding the aperture to those extra photos of yours?
Have you seen the thread at Blenderartists, where someone actualy made a 3D flare object? would be a cool lighting layer object to layer to rig into a scene.
I guess some of them must be added in post-processing. Filming flare is kinda dangerous, too much light can easily ruin the shot, and it’s hard to recover the image when it’s just a wash of white. Adding them in post is much ‘safer’. But some might claim it’s less authentic.
What a coincidence of interests: Blender, Canon photography and lens flares.
I’m working on a Blender node setup for really nice flares, but so far nothing is working too well.
Both my 50mm prime lenses (Modern Canon and Vintage Pentax film mount) give really nice flare, so I have lots of reference to go from. If anyone needs, I can post shots for you.
This guy: (http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=144215) has some pretty sweet anamorphic stuff going on with a 60 node setup. I think it’s a bit too much (read: JJ style) but it’s a cool demo nonetheless.
Brennan, please feel free to share your photos. Some of the older lenses (without all those multiple layers of fancy chemical coating) produces some nice flares.