Lens flare - how to ?

[Adam H. Stewart]

I am working on a shot for the DVD of From the Earth to the Moon. You are flying around the Earth, the sun goes behind the planet, the screen goes black and when you reach the other side of the planet the Sun flares into the camera - revealing the Moon.
My question is how do I recreate a really sexy lens flare - Max Lens Effects are pretty much useless as they consitently flicker in rendering. I have had combustion recommended to me (I am not a combustion user - I am quite good with After Effects) so what do you suggest ? Combustion, After Effects or some 3rd party plug-in like ProOpticSuite from Cebas ?
Thanks for your help.

Adam H. Stewart

[Syclone1]

what ever you do your prob better off doing it in post rather than max its self. If I need a lens flare thats what I usually find the easiest and its usually easier to "tweak" it that way.

-dave

[vance3d]

I would do it in After Effects by using a combination of a standard glow filter, maybe some of the Shine filter from Trapcode and Knoll Light Factory. Knoll will give you all the "lens like" glass element reflection stuff and some nice chroma rings. Shine will give you some cool volumetric like light beams and the glow will do its glow thing.

V Miller

[Adam H. Stewart]

Thanks for the advice

So if I do it in After Effects how do I track the path of the sun ? Is it a matter of doing it by eye, or can I extract camera data from an RLA/RPF file ?

Thanks for your help.


Adam H. Stewart

[ezrhythm]

i place 1 omni, exclude all the objects from it... the rest you know.

[vance3d]

you could track the sun by eye or you could render a pass of just the sun scaled down really small so it just renders as a dot over black and use the tracker in After effects to track it. You could also put a camera at the suns position and render out an rpf from that camera and then render an rpf from your original camera and import them both into AE and copy the keyframes generated by the "Sun" camera to the position of your flare.

Many ways to do it.

V Miller

[trixian]

Just make a preview of your scene and track the light icon with your prefered tracker. You will need to manually animate the strength of your flare in your comp.app though

[Adam H. Stewart]

Thanks for all your help

Thanks guys for all your help. This project is still on going but the early results thanks to your help are pretty stunning. I did a test with Combustion but gave up as I just don't know enough about the software and as the company is mainly AE it meant I couldn't hand it off to anybody else for tweaking.
In the end I used Knoll Light Factory for lens flare, and Trapcode Shine for Volumetrics. I found I didn't need to use a glow layer for this round but I am sure I will as the project progresses. As the move was straightforward I didn't need to track the sun just eyeballed it.
I will try to post some images from the tests if I can figure out how.



Thanks Again

Adam H. Stewart

[Da_elf]

glad there are still some people out there still using After Effects i still love it. hehe.

trapcodes plugins are really nice and so is knoll.
anyone here gotten AE6.5 yet?

[Adam H. Stewart]

My brother is on 6.5

My brother is working in 6.5 and he really likes it. There are some nice features where you can customize your background colors aka 3ds and combustion. Also some super fast particles, he is the expert in AE and would know the knitty gritty of the upgrade, I only dabble, but it is a sweet program.

Adam H. Stewart

[vance3d]

I'm glad things worked out for you with your solar flare.

After Effects is such a great program. I wish they would beef up there 3d import a bit though.

I haven't used 6.5 yet but I like that they have added the video preview through firewire capability to the windows version.

When I have time I want to see if I can program a script that will do the same thing that cinema 4d can do with creating an after effects file automatically. Its a very cool feature that imports a 3d camera, lights and all the render pass layers stacked with the appropriate transfer functions. Nice!

V Miller

[pete242]

what i would need is to get the motionvectors in a rpf-file into after effects and use them for fast motion blur... does anyone knows any plugin for that?

[vance3d]

I wrote a render effects plugin that reads the motion vectors and changes them into red and green pixel info for Real Smart Motion Blur 3. It's not exactly the fastest process in the world but it seems to work. Is this what you're talking about?


V Miller