I've been impressed with many works I've seen in the gallery, and thought I might add one. I person at work asked if I could loft a RF-101 for a RC Model. I thought it might be fun, and a challenge to create it as a solid in ViaCAD. Here's some pictures of it pulled into shark for photorendering. The only Mods to the rendering, were to pull it into Photoshop to add a lense flare effect

Ed Kocialski

Ever since Adobe decided to include a flair plug in within Photoshop, flare has become a very popular effect. Personally though, I wouldn't touch this effect with a barge pole. Why? Well flare is actually a by-product of bad lens coating and bad lens design, where the light is allowed to bounce back and forth between surfaces creating "that look". During the 1960's flare was used creatively- I can for one think of the back cover of Tim Buckley's "Happy Sad" LP, where a portrait of the young singer is swamped in flare, but you can also see the image is lower in contrast, and lacks overall definition (something you really need to consider, if you still think that your renders will benefit from this effect).

Carl Zeiss, Leica and Nikon spent years, and went to great lengths to try and eliminate. Personally I don't think this effect improves a render, as in my opinion, it only makes it look cheap, and/ or distracts from poor use of CAD light programming. If you look in the gallery of the Maxwell renderer plugin, you will find no use of flare anywhere (apart from perhaps when "looking straight into the sun", but even then, those renders don't look that real)- and those Maxwell renders are virtually indistinguishable from real studio photographs.

Tim,
Tried the v6 Lensflare. Great for a single object. When I put the lightsource where I wanted it, I had to incase it in an opaque shere to keep it from casing canopy bowframe shadows on the second object. secondly, it worked on a screen render with a PC, but on the render to file, the lens flare was omitted. This holds a lot of promise. Will the sketch render to screen option be available to render to file?

Ed

DoF would be an absolutely ACE inclusion to Shark 6's renderer. Any chance of this being added Tim?

Excellent stuff Tim :D

There're a lot of audiophiles who like valve amps because the sound is less sterile than a more exact MOSFET reproduction. You might use lens flare precisely because it's eyecatching, and you want to draw the viewer to that feature. I'd call that creative use! At least you can photoshop it anywhere, not the case with a cheap lens.

Just wanted to add that Maxwell Render simulates the diaphragm of the lens as well as other lens/camera characteristics. It is possible to get pleasant looking boheh in the out of focus areas of an image.

Do a search on bokeh if you aren't familiar with the effect (it is easier than explaining it).

I love the models, but I hate the flare!