Real Lens Flare
PRESET BROWSER
As shown in Designer Overview, the Designer interface is comprised of several important areas. We will delve into each of these in turn, starting with the Preset browser.
In VFX Real Lens Flares, a “preset” is a lens flare projection, lens prescription, and/or the collection of characteristic values associated with those projection(s) and prescription. For example, a single default starburst could be a preset, as could a starburst combined with glow ball and spike projections, lens reflections, and a host of detail adjustments. As the name implies, a “preset” is a preset collection of lens and/or projection values all saved as a single group.
The following image illustrates thumbnail images displayed in the preset browser. When Lens Flares is selected, the browser shows all default presets in the Designer library.
You’ll find the preset search bar above the preset thumbnail gallery. This can be a handy way to filter presets quickly. You may search by the specific name of the preset as well as characteristics, such as mood, lens type, and color. Search results will span multiple preset categories, if appropriate. For example:
To clear the search results, either click the X on each search tag or the circular reset arrow near the top-right corner of the browser pane.
Most Recent
The Most Recent feature tracks the 20 most recently viewed presets and displays their thumbnails in the browser for easy reference and access.
Favorites
VFX Real Lens Flares allows you to tag any preset as a favorite. To do this, mouse-over the top-left corner of the preset’s thumbnail. The star icon there will turn white. When you click the star to select it, the star turns blue. All starred presets appear in the favorites gallery.
Lens Flares
We’ll dive into lens flare preset construction in much greater detail later. For now, let’s just touch on lens flare presets from a Designer interface perspective.
This main view shows the three principle preset types all together:
- Core projections are the center of the flare. VFX Real Lens Flares defines five forms of core projection: starburst, glow ball, halo, single spike, and gate flare. Core projections are the building blocks of more complex lens flares.
- Lens simulations are modeled prescriptions of real-world camera lenses. If a scene is shot with, say, a Canon 18-55mm lens at 35mm, the lens preset for that exact simulation may give the lens flare an added degree of realism and authenticity.
- Stylized flares are a collection of lens flare presets created by Maxon as convenient shortcuts for users. They can help match a flare to a known mood or color scheme is seconds rather than having to create the flare from scratch.
Custom Lens Flares
After creating a lens simulation or lens flare just the way you want it, you can save that work as a custom lens flare.
- Click the New button just above the preview pane.
- Give your preset a name.
- Select the folder in which to save it. To create a new folder, simply overwrite the text already in the Folder Name field.
In the example below, we created a new lens flare preset called AquaFlare 42 and saved it in a new folder called Extra Custom. By right-clicking on the thumbnail, VFX Real Lens Explorer offers options to show the Explorer folder containing your custom presets, rename the custom preset, or move it to the Recycle Bin.
