anamorphic lens flare in Blender 2.69 BI - how?

How can I make anamorphic lens flare like this:

in Blender 2.69 with Blender Internal renderer ?

Thanks.

Using the compositor or a 3D flare rig. But the signature anamorphic bokeh (which your image doesn’t have) would mean you need to render at anamorphic ratios then de-stretch in the compositor.

Here’s two simple compositor-only setups. Keep in mind, usually really good flare setups involve stacking a couple different methods (or the same method run with different settings for threshold and streak length, etc).



What does “Less than” do and why use Multiply node if there is only 1 input image?

Also good streaks contain different elements from the light source. By this I mean that the light will over expose on the imaging surface but the flare or lens aberration actually attenuates the brightness, so you can see the structure of the lamp at different intensities. To fake this I would shrink the vertical scale of a flare (erode node the light source) and add chromatic aberration to these smaller sub components. You can do this in post but you have to use erode tools to clip the light source down a bit.

The aperture echo elements are typically faked in the compositor too (glare node) but better result can be had with rigged planes with textures on them.

I think you are over-thinking it, 3pointEdit :slight_smile: It just needs to look cool, that’s all. Making planes with texture will yield worse results.

I imagine that the Less than node is used as a high pass filter which the glare filter node has built in.

While the multiply is to set it over black?

Sure, well the textured plane effects are closer to reality and therefore break the “just look cool” low bar I guess.

BTW this question has been asked in this sub board many many times. did a search not find you anything useful?

Short version: it blacks out everything but highlights.

Long version: The glare node includes a threshold to only act on regions brighter than a certain value. The blur node setup is just blurring the image sideways and adding it back to the original, so that has no threshold. To add it, you use the less-than (math) node to find all regions below a certain brightness, and by hooking that to the factor in a multiply node (set at black) you multiply all those pixels by 0, turning them black. Then you blur and add the result of that.

Aye, thanks. I will mess with it.