Optical Flares Shaking in After Effects

#1

I Have some issues using Optical flares in After Effects CS4 … Basically I’m using a Buffer pass I rendered in Cinema 4D as a Luminance map for the optical flares … All is well the lights appear where they should and the scene looks amazing , only in Animation the Optical flares start moving around like they are wiggled or something . I couldn’t find anything in the settings to fix that , the flicker was turned to 0 and the luminance map was very clean and good ! So why is that happening , specially since I had this problem in another project and ended up not using the Optical flares ut all , But this time Its very crucial I do so can someone tell me why this shaking is happening and if anyone else had this problem and how did they fix it
Thanks in advance …

#2

Optical Flares calculates the centre of each distinct ‘blob’ of light… what qualifies as a light is determined using the threshold property. It sounds to me like the shape or intensity of the light in the luminance pass is changing, so the averaged centre shifts a bit per frame. You could try toggling off ‘track scale’ and ‘track brightness’, or changing the amount of sampling on the luminance source (drop it down if it’s currently set on Full, or increase it if it’s Half or below).

Posting a clip would make this easier to work out, would be particularly helpful to look at your rendered luminance pass.

#3

Ahem, C4D has been able to export 3D lights and Nulls to AE since v7 via the AEC format and the respective import plug-in?! Not sure why you are missing the obvious. You are simply using a rubbish workflow when a better solution is at hand already…

Mylenium

#4

Have you made sure that the distance setting in OF is set to 0? If you have a slight camera move the flare will get exagerated if it is set higher than 0 b/c then the actual light of the OF will be that many pixels farther away from the center. Or yes you could use a null in C4D and export that camera data.

A clip would help or also a project file, I have OF I can take a look.
Good Luck

#5

Yeah , turns out it had to do with Threshold , I set it to 0 and worked out perfectly … Thanks for all the help

#6

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