Digital Painting Software - tutorials with PD Pro Digital Painter 4.1: post work special effects movie specialFX holywood style effects, rising air, turbulent water, animated displacement mapping

PD Pro tutorials:

Post Work with PD Pro 4.1: Adding an Animated Lensflare

more tutorials:

PD Particles

part 7

Digital Painting has never been
so much fun: Learn to paint with Particle Brushes!

PD Particles - $19

A fun companion for your
digital photo image editor!
powered by Project Dogwaffle

We may want to add some glow and novae and lens flare reflections to the video, especially when we have the camera pointing straight at the Sun.

PD Pro 4.1 has an updated animated lens flare system, with many presets and easy setup but also immensely powerful detailed parameter controls.

Run the Timeline editor, and select the Lens flare filter from the "Animated" group

There are three slider parameters for this in the timeline. You can click-and-rag in the preview to position the flare's hotspot. You can reduce the Level to make it go faster.

The Level will control the size and intensity and other things depending on the type of lens flares and reflections.

You'll also see a floating window with numerous presets. Pick one as a start, even if you later want to fine tune for specific looks not available from the presets.

Select the first frame along the timeline.

Then place the flare's hotspot (center of bloom/star) over the Sun showing in the video.

Click the 'Set Key' button to record that position and level for the first frame.

Repeat that a few times, to track the Sun on the video.

As you scrub through the timeline, you'll see the Sun move away from the current hotspot location.

Click the new Sun location ...

....and record another keyframe.

As you move the marker on the timeline, if the Sun doesn't move much, and if the Level of flare is high, it may be difficult to see where the Sun is moving exactly. You could in that case temporarily set the Level to a very low value so it's faster to render and doesn't hide the Sun and skies behind.

You can also track the approximate position 'outside' of the preview window. In case you still want to show some reflections in the lenses. Be sure to gradually reduce the level though.

Here's an example of what's in the clip now:

It is important to do the lens flares after the animated displacement. Indeed, the hot rising air will cause turbulent displacement of the scene, but the lens flares are reflecting inside the camera lense and should show no swimming. In that sense, it is probably a good think NOT to do the lens flares in the 3D program during rendering, if you plan on doing post work like this animated swap displacement. Do the lens flares in PD Pro thereafter.

Run PD Pro on the Mac?
yes you can!! with
Parallels Desktop for Mac

Run MacOS and WIndows (and others) at the same time!

Do you like PD Particles?
then you'll LOVE PD Pro!

see what's new in v3.5
and free update patches

even better: Check out
what's new in v4!