List of Particle Effects

Lens Flare

The 'Lens Flare' effect simulates optical phenomena caused by bright light in a camera's lens system. Lens flare has many controls, which allow for a wide variety of different effects. Several program modules utilize this effect:

• Lens flare particle effect (described below in detail). Particles define the position of flares.
• Lens flare of a camera object. Light sources, which illuminate the camera, create lens flares.
• Image Flare effect. Flares are added to the brightest areas of the image.

The lens flare controls are divided into three tabs.

'Central Glow' tab: 

• Center color: The color of the bright glow in the middle of the flare.
• Edge color: The central glow is faded away towards the edge through this color.
• Central glow size: The diameter of the central glow. Value 1.0 is the full image width.
• Ring color: The color of the thin ring around the central glow.
• Ring size: The diameter of the ring (1.0 is the same as image width). Set to zero to remove the ring.
• Ring thickness: The thickness of the ring.

'Sub Flares' simulate internal lens reflections. The flares make a row passing through the center of the image.

• Count: The total number of circular sub flares. Set to zero to disable this part of the effect.
• Brightness: Defines how bright the sub flares are. Usually low values 0.05 - 0.2 give the best results.
• Random seed: Selects a sequence of random colors and sizes for the flares. Each seed value produces a completely different looking flare sequence.
• Size: The maximum diameter of sub flare rings.

'Streaks' tab controls drawing of stars. 'Regular' streaks have the same length and they are drawn at regular angle intervals. 'Random' streaks have varying lengths and random directions.

• Regular & Random Center color: The color of streaks in the middle of the flare.
• Regular & Random End color: The streaks fade away towards the end via this color.
• Regular & Random Count: The number of streaks.
• Regular & Random Size: The length of regular streaks and the maximal length of random streaks.
• Regular & Random Thickness: The thickness of streaks in the center of the flare.
• Regular Angle: Defines the orientation of regular streaks. Changing the value rotates the streaks (which naturally can be animated).
• Random Speed: The random streaks appear and fade away in animations, creating an impression of light radiation. This control defines how quickly the streaks change. Value zero freezes the random streaks to be static.

Particle Disks

This effect draws a disk to represent each particle. The size of all the disks is constant and defined by the effect. The colors of the disks are defined by the particles' colors. You could, for example, texture map the particles using a 'Post Particles' shader (see the VSL manual for details). The edges of the particle discs are always faded to full transparency in order to guarantee smooth blending with the rendered image. Assigning a suitable 'Fade' channel value to the particles controls the overall transparency of the disks.

The effect is simple and quick to render when the disk size is small. Therefore it is quite suitable for representing smoke, dust, fire and other particle effects which can be defined by a large flock of particles.

The effect has the following controls:

• Particle Size: The common diameter of all particles. The size is measured as real world units; typically a value such as one millimeter is quite suitable. The effect scales the size of particles by taking the perspective projection properties of the camera into account. Zero size has a special treatment: each particle is drawn by one single pixel, which is a very fast operation.
• Drawing Mode: Defines how particles are drawn into the image. The drawing modes are listed below.

The drawing modes are: