Squint/flare effect

[tricky]

You know that thing you see in your eyes when you squint your eyes together and look towards the sun - like a flare/rainbow/diffraction sort of effect???? Any way to achieve that in vray? I will try and find a picture...

[Neilg]

You're looking to use a bitmap filter that will create the fine star burst shape, obstacle maps to dirty it up a bit & diffraction to spread the color out in the lens effects dialog. Probably easiest to set up a simple scene of a bright white source in the middle to test.

[joconnell]

Oddly someone's done that for real photos by making paper eyelashes, it's more of a lens flare package thing than vray though - knoll light and optical flares both do it.

[tricky]

Thanks guys. We'd likely do this as a post thing rather than expect vray to do it in-scene. Maybe I'll keep searching google images for a high res image to overlay.

[Neilg]

Definitely get knoll flares or copilots optical flares if you're doing it in post - both of them are great at what they do.

[tricky]

I have tried to look at them before. I remember wanting a demo of Copilot Optical Flares but when I asked, they said they didn't do demos as 'the website speaks for itself'! That p**sed me off so I walked away! When I swallow my pride and have a spare moment, I may reconsider.