Feature request: Physically correct Lens Flares

Anonymous · ‎05-18-2021

I love the Imagers Lens Effects!

I wonder if it would be possible to add realistic and editable lens flares. I know lens flares are usually added in compositing but I can see advantages to adding realistic optical artifacts into Arnold. The ability to add dirt maps, illumination and sharpness falloff and other subtle "real world" optical artifacts could be a nice option.

Imagine having presets the behave like real lenses. Examples like Arri Master Anamorphics, Cook S4s or even old school Zeiss super speeds, Canon K35s. One of the main creative choice that a DP makes is their lens selection. I know this is a big request; But I remember an article about how Pixar "modeled" the imperfections of master primes for Walle.

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/educational/oscar-winning-dop-roger-deakins-talks-about-what-he-has-lear...

https://www.ibc.org/interviews/behind-the-scenes-toy-story-4/4109.article

https://www.insider.com/how-pixar-created-a-perfect-animated-romance-scene-deakins-walle-2020-7

“We studied a range of lenses and honed in on Cooke Anamorphics. We studied their distortion, lens breathing and how the bokeh shifts so we could capture that ‘Cooke look’.”

madsd · ‎05-18-2021

I have pushed the notion of OSL hooks to the Imager nodes for some time,directly to the developers. I started pushing this notion as soon as we got ARV and the imager node concept exposed in the applications.

Dev already know we need it.
It would not only improve the situation significantly, it would also put the lens effects into the hands of users, and as we are many, plenty would be written at a fast pace.

Lens flares are far from the only thing you can use this for.
We can do the lensflare code in OSL, this is fairly straight forward, we need the actual hook and implementation.