Using the Sun Beams Node with Camera/Object Animation
Luca Scheller shares a method to gain more control over the direction of sun beams in Blender 2.72.
Hey there :) So Blender has recently got a new node called Sun Beams, which (as you probably have already guessed) creates light rays/god rays from an image/alpha input. The direction of the sun beams is determined by the x and y values. Sadly the node doesn’t have the option yet to plug in an x/y coordinate, so for now you would have to animate it manually in order for the sun beams to cast in the same direction if the sun beams casting object or the camera moves. Here I show you a quick and easy workaround using a tracking point and a driver with an expression.
Comments and feedback are highly appreciated :)
That’s very cool. But the node itself still lacks the feature that’d make it really useful. I mean, your workaround is great, but what if the light source is outside of the image? We need a node for converting an object’s 3D position into 2D coordinates on screen.
Well the importan part is that the tracking marker gives you the correct counter-animation to the
camera movement. That said you could just increase the offset value at the end
of the expression to move the light source origin point out of the camera frame
and it should still work pretty decently.
-Luca
lots of good tips in that tut ,but im gonna have to watch it a dozen times to get them all. haha thanks book marking now
Thanks for watching :)
-Luca