Procedural Lens Flare Simulator V1.0

Procedural Lens Flare Generator For Blender 4.2+

IMPORTANT

Currently only works in Blender 4.2+, Make sure GPU acceleration is turned on in the compositor.

Recommend resolution is 1080p, this is not real-time, It can quickly get slow at higher resolutions.

Node execution time(GPU): ~2 seconds @1080p

TIPS:

For flares to apear correctly in glossy or translucent surfaces, it is recommended to turn off light clamping by setting it to 0 or using a very high number.

Avoid using GPU denoising for now as it can cause some inconsistencies with brightness.

Currently Supported Lenses:

• Leica 35mm
  

This is a Node-setup that relies on GPU accelerated compositing in Blender to generate realisitc lens flares.

No tracking of lights is required and will generate flares in screenspace using render input. You can also generate flares from EXR sequences.

Every pixel is accounted for without a threshold meaning light source for flares is the entire frame.

These were created using real or raytraced reference, so every element of the flare should morph and behave realistically.

Flares being generated from glossy surfaces

Behaves similarly to the glare node and can be used to replace bloom

Features:

• Anamorphic squeeze
• Lens Coating
• Dispersion
• Bokeh cut-off
• Bokeh fringing
• Edge Fade

Features Soon (WIP):

• Custom aperture
• Custom Lens Coat
• Sirui 50mm Anamorphic flare
• Canon 18-55mm Zoom flare

Known Issues:

• When light source becomes extremely small, some flickering can occur.
• Some flare elements do not scale that well with resolution.
• These flares are screenspace, they will fade out when out of frame.

ACES colour management is recommended.