Lens Effects Filters

Command entry:Rendering menu

Video Post

Video Post toolbar

(Add Image Filter Event)

Choose a Lens Effects Filter from the Filter Plug-In list.

The Lens Effects filters add realistic camera flares, glows, gleams, glimmers, and depth-of-field blurring to your scenes. Lens Effects can affect an entire scene or can be generated around specific objects in your scene.

Lens Effects are applied through the Video Post interface. To learn about adding scene and image filter events to the video post queue, see Add Scene Event, and Add Image Filter Event.

Lens Effects includes the following filters:

Lens Effects Flare: Creates the optical effect that occurs when a bright light reflects across the lens of a camera.
Lens Effects Focus: Creates a blur on objects based on their distance from the camera. tracks an object’s distance from the camera using a Z-Buffer. Focus uses the Z-Buffer information from the scene to create its blurring effects.
Lens Effects Glow: Creates a glowing light around any assigned object, such as a laser beam or the thruster on a space ship.
Lens Effects Highlight: Creates a bright cross star effect on a designated object.

WarningWhen you animate Lens Effects parameters, this creates pointers into the actual scene, so Lens Effects animation is lost if you save the Video Post queue in a VPX file. To preserve the animation, save the Video Post data, including Lens Effects animation, in the MAX file.

Procedures

Lens Effects like Glow and Highlight can be set to affect specific objects in your scene based on their G-Buffer ID. This lets you apply glows and highlights to the object, or to the material, or both.

To set an object's G-Buffer ID:

Select the object.
Right-click the object and then choose Properties from the quad menu.
In the Object Properties dialog, set G-Buffer Object Channel to a nonzero value, and then click OK.
The G-Buffer ID can be any positive integer.

If you give the same G-Buffer ID value to more than one object, all these objects will be post-processed.

Lens Effects File Types
Several file types allow you to save Lens Effects settings.
Animating Lens Effects Properties
Lens Effects let you use Track View to control parameters that can be animated while Video Post remains open. Any parameter with a green arrow button next to it can be animated.
Lens Effects Flare Filter
The Lens Effects Flare dialog lets you add lens flare effects as a post process to rendering. Flares are usually applied to lights in your scene. The lens flare will then be generated around that object. You can control all aspects of the lens flare in the Lens Effects Flare dialog.
Lens Effects Focus Filter
The Lens Effects Focus dialog lets you blur objects based on their distance from the camera. Focus uses the Z-Buffer information from the scene to create its blurring effects. You can use Focus to create effects such as foreground elements in focus and background elements out of focus.
Lens Effects Glow Filter
The Lens Effects Glow dialog lets you add a glowing aura around any assigned object. For example, for an exploding particle system, adding a glow to the particles makes them seem as though they are brighter and hotter.
Lens Effects Highlight Filter
The Lens Effects Highlight dialog lets you assign bright, star-shaped highlights. Use it on objects that have shiny materials. For example, a shiny, red car might show highlights in bright sunlight.
Lens Effects Gradients
A gradient is a smooth linear transition from one color or brightness to another, as shown below. Lens Effects use gradients to control aspects of the lens flares, such as colors and transparency. Lens Effects use several gradient types.

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