Lukas Tönne is working on a new node to quickly render 'sun beam' effects.
Sun Beams is a 2D effect for simulating the effect of bright light getting scattered in a medium (Crepuscular Rays). This phenomenon can be created by renderers, but full volumetric lighting is a rather arduous approach and takes a lot of render time. Also when working with 2D images only the volumetric data may not be available. In these cases the "Sun Beams" node provides a computationally cheap way of creating a convincing effect based on image brightness alone.
17 Comments
Sounds great. But the link for the patch is dead.
link for patch is developer.blender.org/D655
Sorry about that, I've fixed it.
This will be a great addition if it makes it easy to create a visible 'laser beam' that doesn't pass straight through solid objects in Cycles!
Until now I manage this effect with the Directional Blur node by placing the center of the effect far outside from the light source (Those windows in this example). In case you need that streaky effect, just multiply the window matte with a noise/clouds texture. I've used this approach in both Blender and After Effects.
It looks great, but as far as I know, sun beams would be completely parallell due to the distance to the sun. The beams we see through the windows now must be from a very strong light, probably on a space ship on a visit from another galaxy ... :)
If they are coming towards you they don't look parallel because of the perspective. Just look at "real" photos or try to remember the last time you saw those streaks coming throug a hole in the clouds that form a pyramid.
Yep, you're right. Perspective is definetively playing a part here ... :)
This is a really great addition thanks Lukas!
Super cool & great job!
With this marvelous increment Blender will become even more photorealistic!
Thanks Lukas, this looks great looking forward to giving it a try.
how is your node based particle system going was trying to get more info on it recently. Is it still in progress?
regards,
Michael.
This'll be so useful! I often enjoy using this kind of effect, and I was disappointed with the speed and quality I was getting with just using a volumetric material. This'll be a great help!
this is gonna be great, wish i could do patches. cant ever get them to work i always crash the program. oh well, its the sun beam build or try it again, haha hope it gets into trunk woho
this will bring great new possibilities to Blender's compositor, this post processing effect is often seen everywere in modern games. one thing to be reminded of is that this effect is in screenspace, therefor only parts onscreen will cast sunrays, this isn't as acurate as real volumetrics but it is a lot faster and has many more uses in compositing, and isn't limited to 3D scenes.
This should work on live action video footage right? Lately I've been using blender, mostly, for compositing live action footage.
Looks Awesome. Already started imagining what all can be done with this. :)