Realistic Lens Flares
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 9:55AM When technology and art intersect, its often the case that those who know how have no idea why, and those who know why have no idea how.
I can’t stop thinking about this SIGGRAPH video. It shows realistic lens flares being computed in real time using a ray tracing technique. There are some lens artifacts shown here of a complexity and beauty that I’ve never seen faked convincingly before.
Lens flare is caused by light passing through a photographic lens system in an unintended way. Often considered a degrading artifact, it has become a crucial component for realistic imagery and an artistic means that can even lead to an increased perceived brightness.
Jesus nerds. “Increased perceived brightness?” That was the best sales pitch you could give on why being able to synthesise realistic lens flares is worthwhile?
Lens flares are awesome because they are fricking crazy. They are completely unreal. They increase the veil of unreality between the audience and the movie. They are beautiful. They are tiny imperfections magnified by orders of magnitude. They are aliens. And scary buildings. We give them sound effects and music cues. They make movies bigger than life because they have nothing to do with life.
And I want yours.
In the Vimeo comments the poster said:
Anamorphic optics are currently not supported, but this is not a principal limitation of the rendering scheme.
If they had put anamorphic examples in this video I think I’d be standing on their lawn with a boom box right now.
Physically-Based Real-Time Lens Flare Rendering — Hullin, Eisemann, Seidel, Lee
Reader Comments (15)
Drool.
Haha, yeah, increased perceived brightness. That's the kind of stuff you come up with when one of the reviewers is a jerk and thinks awesome looking flare at real-time frame rates is not good enough... :D
Wonderful to see you here Matthias! Congratulations on your amazing work. And that is hilarious, and exactly what a very smart friend of mine theorized in a private email.
Gotta keep the publication engine running when you're a nerd by profession.
So do I have your word that the very moment we implement anamorphic optics, you'll be ensonifying our garden? :)
Trust me, that garden's gonna be crowded.
Matthias, have you made any more headway or considerations for commercializing this product?
As cool as this would be for film and broadcast work, i can't help but think that this would have some really cool applications in gaming.
That would give amazing depth in a 3d scene, and i would imagine that it would distract you from the "low" polycount of characters and environments.
If they limit the number of flares on screen and maybe the number of elements per flare, it would have limited impact on performance on low end machines.
Simply amazing work. I'd love to see this as a plug-in that would work with Conduit for live keying. Mixing this technology with live keying and a virtual set would open up a whole new level of low budget filmmaking for DV Rebels...
I agree quite beautiful but I wonder if this obsession to add imperfections to existing footage in post production is roughly analogous to adding audible 'pops' and 'scratches' to digital audio recordings to make them sound like vinyl. In Tree of Life one of Terence Malick's 'rules' was to avoid lens flares while at the same time to 'use backlighting for continuity and depth'. Sounds like a contradiction but I think if you were to poll a majority of ASC members they would say their preference is to avoid lens flare at all cost.
I don't claim to know what most members of the ASC would prefer but I would guess that Bob Richardson, Vilmos Zsigmond and Daniel Mindel (to name but three) would put something like this to good use, in post, helping CGI and additional photography match some of the original photography in the films they've worked on.
Whether to include lens flares or not is no longer of a question of a "clean" or "dirty" lens, and hasn't been for decades really. It's a matter of personal taste and it's project dependent.
I like them in lots of things, but I wouldn't want them all over 'The Godfather' for example.
So I for one welcome our new shiny and dazzling overlords, at least some of the time. :)
I wonder if when food bloggers write about paprika, they get comments warning that not every dish needs paprika?
I suppose that depends on whether they are Hungarian or not?
Much as I like these lens flares, there needs to be an automated Chill Out factor as part of the application. This way, folks could be prevented from using them all over the place. The first time I show depth of field blur based on Z depth in class, the next week's homework looks like someone purposefully rendered things out of focus. I can see this coming with the flares once they make their way into apps. Maybe something that gauges the newness and dorkitude of the user and intelligently scales back the intensity and brightness...
FYI: My SIGGRAPH talk is now online (here).
Awesome. Thanks Matthias. And now that I've heard you say "by trying to avoid flare, optical engineers actually made our artifacts even more beautiful," I feel even worse about making fun of the opening paragraph of your paper.