Red Giant Fighting Back With Knoll 3D Flare

To combat the competition on the horizon that is Video Copilot’s Optical Flares plugin, Red Giant Software is developing their newest extension to Knoll Light Factory, called Knoll 3D Flare.  Now 3D lens flares and positioning has always been possible with Knoll, you just needed a little jerry-rigging, but with the new extension, it is going to make it super easy, as well as adding a bunch of attributes that will make using your lens flares a lot easier, and hopefully (for RGS) keep you with Knoll over Optical Flares.

Aharon Rabinowitz posted some details over on the Red Room Blog as to what some of the features of the extension are and exactly what they do.  Talking more with Aharon, he told me about how this extension is going to work… and it seems like they are pushing (if you own KLF Pro already and get this extension) for you to almost exclusively have your lens flares linked the 3D AE lights.  The way this is going to operate, is with one click you can choose the light to rig your lens flare to, and it’s done.  You will have a full 3D capable Knoll lens flare to move around and use in your composition.  Let’s take a deeper look at some of the other new features:

• 3D Camera Aware – This is a feature that you have been able to do for a while, but needed some use and knowledge of expressions, but what this does is lets you link a lens flare to a 3D AE light’s XYZ position so that you can orbit around in your 3D world and let it have a true 3D position in your compositions.
• Z-Depth – Nice… more real world simulations being introduced.  This makes the distance of the camera from the flare effects the flare’s intensity, just like it would inside of a camera.
• Color Linking – Again, another feature that has been able to be created with expressions just got easier.  This will make your AE light’s color effect your flare’s color, saving you a bit of time without having to write out expressions.
• Intensity Linking – Same as the previous, except with the intensity of the flare being affected by the AE light’s intensity.
• Multiple Lights – Now, this might seem like an obvious feature, but there are some plugins out there, like Particular 1.5 and actually integrated effects like Shatter that don’t support past 1 or 2 lights.  This is a big jump in having all lights in your comp influence each other and all the layers.
• World Scale – This allows you to control the amount of flare scaling relative to a light’s distance from the camera, for added realism, and to take take into account how flare’s would act in a camera.
• Edge Flareup – This is one of the features that really caught my eye with Optical Flares, and its great to see that Knoll is taking this into account.  What it is, is when your lens flare source hits the edge of the frame of your camera in the real world you get some weird sparkling, moving flare effects.  This replicates that effect when you move your lens flare to the edge of the composition.
• Full 3D Obscuration – Kind of obvious what this is from the name, but what happens is ANY 3D layer in your comp can obscure your lens flare causing it dim when behind objects.  This only works if your flare is linked to a 3D light though.

There is also one other feature that is being developed that wasn’t reported on the Red Room Blog, which they are calling RGB Obscuration.  What this does, is say you have 3 solids, all different colors, set to 25% transparency each.  The lens flare (linked to an AE light), gets obscured behind the solids, but you can still see see the light partially.  The RGB Obscuration feature then takes effect, taking into account the colors of your lens flare + the colors and transparencies of the solids, and mixes them to create the appropriate effect.  You can imagine what this can open up for creating more and more realistic effects.

Like Aharon says in the blog posting, this is by no means a complete list, but it does give us an idea of what is to come and to combat the imminent release of Optical Flares.  Knoll does have an advantage though, already being an industry standard, but they are going to have a run for their money when Video Copilot released the new product.  It is going to be very interesting to see who comes out on top in this battle.