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Shine

Source Point and Ray Length

The Source Point marks the center of a Shine effect and thus the direction from which your crepuscular rays emanate. You can place the Source Point up to one layer dimension outside the layer’s boundary. So, if your layer is 600 pixels wide, you can place the Source Point up to 600 pixels to the left or right beyond the layer’s boundary.

Note that the farther away your source point is from your layer’s luminous area(s), the less effect you’re likely to see, especially beyond the layer’s boundary. In the image below, we had to crank the Ray Length and Boost Light values way up just to get this minor effect (right).

The Source Point Type drop-down menu lets you control the light rays’ source. The default selection is 2D, which uses two-dimensional Source Point values to control the light source. Set these values with the crosshairs or draggable x and y coordinate inputs. Alternatively, just use your mouse to grab the Source Point and drag it around.

You can also change the Source Point Type value to 3D Light, allowing you to use an After Effects light as the light source. Since After Effects lights can move in 3D space, their light in Shine can be moved in three dimensions.

Note: The one functional difference between how Shine runs under Adobe After Effects vs. DaVinci Resolve is that the latter lacks support for 3D lights. Thus, there's also no support for using a light to control fractal noise, as you can in AE. If you're curious, the same omission appears within Adobe Premiere Pro, which also lacks lights.

If you use 3D Light is important that the name of the light in your After Effects comp matches the name in the Source Point Name drop-down exactly, including capitalization. For example, if the Source Point Name drop-down is set to the default of Shine, then you must have a light named Shine in your After Effects composition for it to be used as a light lays Source Point.

Ray Length controls how far rays shoot out. A length of 0.0 means your Source Point is effectively a singularity, a black hole that emits no light and merely waits to swallow the galaxy. Interestingly, though, if you keep increasing Ray Length, the rays may grow ever dimmer, depending on other variables.

Bonus: Ray Length has no influence on render times.

Short Ray Length Long Ray Length