So you may have caught on twitter that I was playing around with something called Knoll 3D Flare. It’s something being worked on and tested here at Red Giant, based on a project file sent to us in August, by David Vinson, Senior Visual Effects Supervisor at Outpost Pictures.
Basically K3DF is a new set of features to enhance Knoll Light Factory Pro, Hollywood’s go-to lens flare solution.
Currently, the feature set includes:
- 3D Camera Aware: Link a lens flares to a 3D Light’s XYZ position.
- Z-Depth: Distance of flare from camera effects flare’s intensity.
- Color Linking: Light color effects flare color.
- Intensity Linking: Light intensity effects flare’s intensity.
- Multiple Lights: Apply to every light in your comp.
- World Scale: Control the amount of flare scaling relative to a light’s distance from the camera
- Edge Flareup: As flares near the edge of the comp they automatically brighten and flareup replicating natural lens phenomena.
- Full 3D Obscuration: All 3D layers in your composition can be used to obscure the flare. As the 3D light travels behind a layer, the flare dims and goes out.
This is not a final or complete list. It’s just something that’s being worked on with the ultimate goal of making Knoll Light Factory Pro, already an industry standard, even better.
What’s really interesting to note is that Knoll Light Factory Pro has been able to do most of this stuff for years! 3D lens flares and light linking are not new. I’ve been using them for a long time. However it required some knowledge of expressions – which you can easily pick up at Dan Ebbert’s Motion Script.com.
Anyway we’d love to hear your thoughts on these features, and what you might want to see in Knoll. Personally, I’m really impressed with 3D obscuration. Being able to have the flare wink out of existence when it goes behind any 3D layer opens up a lot of possibilities and makes life a lot easier.
