Cinematic Lens Flares is an image based Lens Flare implementation intended for high quality cinematic outputs and also is somewhat usable in high end Real-Time applications like games with a limited number of elements / effects.

AS SEEN IN RECENT MARATHON CINEMATICS

Version 5 is out now! Check out the latest OVERVIEW and TRAILER

Paired with the included control Blueprint, Cinematic Lens Flares offers a large amount of customization and unlimited layers to emulate four main lens flare effects

• LENS GLINTS: The often star or streak like lines from bright light sources.

• LENS GHOSTS: The inter reflections of bright light sources on the lens elements.

• LENS GLINT RING: A circular or aperture shaped streak / star effect.

• LENS HALO: An outer lens reflection around the edges of the screen.

Lens Glints, Lens Ghosts, Lens Glint Ring and a Lens Halos can be added by simply adding the Cinematic Lens Flares V5 post process material to your Post Process Volume and dropping the control Blueprint into your scene.

This asset requires to have Niagara Fluids Plugin enabled on your project BEFORE you add the asset, otherwise the material may not compile correctly, if this occours you can just re add the asset to the project from the Epic launcher once Niagara Fluids has been enabled.

Version 5 Core Features

• The largest feature is the introduction of Layers, each of the four effects can now be layered as many times as you wish, with each layer having its own unique parameters which allows for extreme customisation. 

• The single Niagara Fluids system that runs my custom HLSL code has been split into one system per effect type, this not only allows for more parameters and layering, but also helps with performance. 

• Each of the effects have been extensively re-written and enhanced with many more options.

• Bokeh Blur shaping has been re-built with proper aperture blades based shape generation.

• Bokeh Blur now supports Petzval warping (swirly or cat eye bokeh).

• Lens Ghosts can now have a much more realistic Anamorphic behavior to them. 

• Lens Glints now have noise based colour diffusion, polarisation as well as edge brightening and lengthening. 

• Lens Halos now have scratches implemented that split the colours and a much nicer fisheye look. 

• Effects are now much more resolution agnostic, when you up the working resolution your look stays mostly the same now. 

• An all new data asset based preset system, featuring a preset tool that lets you save presets with one click. 

• Scene Colour sampling has been vastly improved with less jitter / flickering (unable to completely remove jitter due to temporalAA),

At it's core Cinematic Lens Flares is based upon Niagara. Running through Niagara allows for lens flare logic to be done at much lower resolution, allowing for 100x performance speedup vs the old method.

Created with HLSL, Cinematic Lens Flares offers an option for high end rendered cinematics & real-time for some beautiful lens effects.

This implementation is designed to work in combination with convolution bloom for the best visual look.

Cinematic Lens Flares work with both rasterised rendering like Lumen as well as limited support for Unreal's Path Tracer (non layered version 4 only) and even the forward renderer!