Optical flares

[ChuckRT]

Hello, I remember long ago there were some plugins that could make optical flares inside 3ds max, could it be possible to create them in vray?

[dimitar_panayotov]

Optical? Do you mean like a stretched lens flare similar to the ones produced by an anamorphic cinema lens?

We have this panel in VFB that gives a lot of options.

[ChuckRT]

Ohh sorry it didnt upload the image reference

[dimitar_panayotov]

Hi! Well, I just spoke with devs and unfortunately we can't produce this effect in V-Ray. It's called Ghosting. In real life, it's a result of all the small lenses inside the tube of a lens. In our case, we do not represent these optical elements in our camera. So in order to produce something like this, we need to create a profile of all the characteristics of these lenses.

[ChuckRT]

Ohhhh, well maibe in the future, thanks

[^Lele^]

Like this one?
Look up the video post in the rendering menu


or the effects entry in the same menu:


*important* post-scriptum: they are only compatible with scanline, so expect slowdowns and crashes if you want to use them with V-Ray.
they are 30 years old code.
It shouldn't be too big of an issue to switch to scanline to render the flares alone and composite them later (ofc, you may need a proper scene setup to deal with occluders and so on.).

[ChuckRT]

Thanks Lele I knew about this, like you said, its pretty old and I wanted to know if Chaos team could make something like this inside V-Ray, this effect I do it in Post

[fixeighted]

I guess you know about https://www.videocopilot.net/products/opticalflares/ so I'd say that's the literal best available solution, unless Chaos wants to develop basically a copy of this, which I would doubt is in their roadmap tbh

[ChuckRT]

Thanks fixeighted yeah I saw them long ago, there are lots of useful tools for Post, I was wondering if we could have them inside V-Ray like we have Glares, Vignette, etc

[fixeighted]

Yes it would be cool, although it's a very specific effect, so as a basic part of a toolset I just reckon it's not something that is worth Chaos's dev time, when it's so much more easily/quickly done as a post thing.
You never know though...

[^Lele^]

It is unlikely we'll work on something like this anytime soon (we are quite loaded with tasks across the board...): as explained before, to do so in camera, which would be interesting and very slow, would require enormous efforts, while developing against established industry standards (RedGiant, Video Copilot, Adobe, etc.) a post-effect is a bit out of our scope.

But i'll be sure to mention it to the relevant Devs, and report should i hear good noises from them.