lens flare blooming

[Mylenium]

i know it must be a simple solution

There is none. Think it over: AE's lensflare does not emit any light. Hence AE has no clue about the actual light being distributed nor does it know about obscuration. In addition. lights in AE have no falloff or volume, so there is no reference about the "size" of a laight source or its halo. These are two simple things in a 3D environment with scanline and raytracing support, but impossible in AE. You have to do it manually. Add a circle effect with feathered edges and use it in Add mode to simulate the light wrapping/ blooming.

Mylenium

[trancor]

well, there are a few posibilities on how to create the effect without it being 100% manual.


First you should put the flair effect on an adjustment layer ontop of the house but below the picket fence. Maybe another in front of the picket perhaps. But put the effect on the adjustment layer, this would get some glare comin around the house, sure you'd need to play with the fallout so it looks less over the house then in the sky layer.

I would go about this by writing up a small expression finding the distance between the house's hotpoint and the light in z depth (x1 - x2 y1 - y2 z1 - z2) style. And including the width of the actual image plane for the house, you could do a is over of X % over 100 to get a percentage of how far away the light would be from the house and how the fall off can be effected. Not too hard to do if you know how to write up some basic expressions and don't mind math.

edit -
is X %
of 100

(is * 100)/of=%

Course you can always link things to expression sliders, that way you could have the house darken as the light is visible behind the house and as you bring the light source behind the house, lower the slider to raise the brightness of the house and lower the falloff of the light (simple pick whips for this). Along with the halo effect and what ever else you'd want to use.

I don't know how into expressions you really are, if I were doing this I would write the script to evaluate the hight and width of the house and find the angle between the camera and the light and have it find exactly the point in space that it would cross with the plane of the house to deside weither or not the house is wide enough to cover up the light.

But yeah, easiest way to do it is how Mylenium said.

[berniebernie]

As far as I know AE cannot natively check if there's a RGBA pixel in a given layer at a given position, and I'm not even sure how far you can check a layer's bounds

So implementing the stupidest of raytracing (checking if there's something obstructring the light>camera path) is gonna be a tough cookie...

But then again, I'd love to be proved wrong!

[victor throe]

its one of those things that seems like it should be easy...to a technical goof like me anyway

expressions? what are they :)

[rhodeder]

you could always get a blooming like effect from the glow effect. it really blooms colors out like 3d blooming. just mess with it a little

[suztv]

Try lux and starglow from trapcode - I am sure the combination of those two should give you something similar to what you are looking for.

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.