Easy Flares Pro - Procedural Lens Flares

Easy Flares Pro



The Easy Flares Pro editor-extension allows you to easily generate and render procedural AAA quality lens flares. When working with procedural flares there is no need for any textures, this reduces your build file size drastically.

Style System
Every flare is stored in a separate style file. The style file can be exchanged between designers or easily ported to another project. This way your flare presets can be well organized and reused.

Artist-Friendly Interface
The artist-friendly interface lets you create millions of unique lens flares. With its layer-based workflow you get stunning results in no time.

​

Procedural Rendering
With Easy Flares Pro you have the possibility to render most of the flare elements in a procedural manner. That means you don't need to have any textures for those. Another advantage of procedural flares, beside the smaller builds size, is that they are resolution-indepentent. That means, they can never look jaggy nor blurry.

Screenshots

Psychodelic Flare



Anamorphic Flare I



Anamorphic Flare II



Sun Flare



Dark Side of Mars (by Stuart Spencer)


Mountain Scene


Early and Beta Access
As always you can download the latest releases here.

 

When?
Where?
How much?
iOS/Android?
Webplayer-Demo?

 

Looking good!

Is this using luminance values of the frame to render (Screen Space Post Process?)?
Does this need colliders to fading out lens flares ?
Anything you can say about its performance?

Thanks

 

When?
Submission: Tomorrow.
Release: Depends on the Unity reviewers.

Where?
Unity Asset Store.

How much?
Around 35$ while in the beta phase. Later, the price will be at least doubled.

iOS/Android
Not fully supported in the beta phase. Newer devices have limited support in the beta phase.

Webplayer Demo?
Is on the way.

 

@gurayg : Currently the system only supports emitters in 3D-space (hook it to light or game object). A frame sampling options will join the framework at a later stage. Due the fact that the complete framework is available in Unity Pro and Unity Free, we are working on a fast down-sampling method to sample luminance values from.

 

Good to know this will get some Unity Pro goodies on its way.

When do you think this feature may get added (a month?)?

I suppose, this'll let us to use our textures if we choose to and render out lens flare textures from the editor if needed.

Have you tested this with Unity 5 Release Candidates?

Any info about the drawcalls that is produced by your asset if used as 3d emmiters?

 

The framework has not been fully tested in Unity 5. We start to port all our assets in the next two months.

Due the fact that every flare element (of the same type) requires its own shader, a five-layered style (composed of 5 different elements) needs also five draw calls. But we are working on combining stage in the render pipeline, where all elements of the same type get composed. That means no matter how many flares you want to render, you will only have to pay one draw call per element type.

We will also include a bunch of flare element textures (starbursts, iris ghosts, etc) and you could use them with non-procedural flares, but the main focus is on procedural rendering. In the fututre we will even massively push the old school texture flares, due the fact that the non-pro version will only render the old, the textured way.

 

Some additional renderings done with Easy Flares Pro...

Massive Flare



Another Sun Flare

 

Check out the Easy Flares Pro web demo:

Easy Flares Pro - Space Web Demo

 

Nice, but it does not support fadeout when blocked? The demo just turns off the flare.

 

@imtrobin Yes. Fade out is supported. You can choose between three occlusion modi: None, Simple and Accurate.

None
No occlusion calculation at all.

Simple
The calculation is performed with just one point of reference (the flare position itself).
The result is binary: visible or hidden.

Accurate
The calculation is performed with a variable amount of points (Occlusion Resolution). The final occlusion value is computed by Visible Points / Occlusion Resolution.

A smooth linear interpolation over time is available in version 0.9.x which we will release in the next few weeks.

You can also enable the so called Centroid Occlusion. In this mode the point of interest (flare position in space) gets automatically adjusted towards the point of mass of the visible area of the flare.

Furthermore you have the possibility to the control the occlusion intensity as a function of the amount of reference points visible to the camera. This way you could give the flare a 'boost' when it gets occluded.

 

Nice. But now, it not support Android, iOS. So i will dont buy this.

 

Yes mobile devices are not supported during the beta cycles (0.8.x - 0.9.x). The shaders used to render a procedural lens flare are indeed very complex, so an average mobile device will notice a perfomance impact rendering those.
But it's always the same with software which is built from scratch and providing a new way to do a core job:

1. The software will not be able to offer all functionalities others do in its beta phase.
2. The software needs the beta cycle to get improved on the different devices. You should not target the weaker devices from the very beginning. When doing so, high-end devices can not unleash their full potential (no tech progress here).
3. The software needs user feedbacks & inputs, especially while in the beta phase, to become the tool the users need.

Because of those three points mentioned above, Easy Flares is only 50% of the regular price while in the beta phase.

But there will be a texture bake option and a combined shader so Easy Flares can render on all devices with good performances.

 

Easy Flares Pro is now available in the Asset Store! During the beta phase we sell it for -50% of the regular price!

 

You can now download the newest builds on the new Download Area.
Just add your order/invoice number to you account and browse the downloads.

Let us know what you think about it!

 

EasyFlares is very impressive! I really like the idea of layering dirt, glows, streaks etc and the results are stunning! Overall it is so easy to use, even without reading a single line of the docs I could edit the flare styles or create new ones. Congratulations to this asset!

So far I have only one question: Is it possibe to unlock the flares from the aspect ratio? Right now all effect layers are streched, perfectly round flare effects would be visible at square resolution (1024*1024). Formats like 32:9 oder 9:16 show streched flare results!? It seems the flares scale with the current resolution. How to get resolution independant flare effects?

 

Glad to hear that you like Easy Flares!
We received some feedbacks complaining that the style editor was too advanced.

Currently you cannot unlock the aspect ratio, but you can correct it in the Transformation tab.

When having a aspect ratio of 16:10 you can correct it in x direction with 16/10=1.6 to get a correct round glow.


Hope that helped!

 

I think it is very balanced, it gives a good and easy overview but has many parameters to tweak. Also the settings are more or less the same for the different layer styles, this makes it even more simple. Using curves for falloff etc. makes sense. There is only one little issue, at the first time I did not know how to start, but once I recognized you have to edit the styles which are used by flare emitters everything was really easy!

Thanks, I already did it that way and it works! Maybe auto aspect correction could be a useful feature for future updates as the correction have to be done in every layer, also there are a few elements where distortion transformation does not work (f.e lens color, dirt).

 

In the next documentation overhaul we'll cover this topic more clear. Thanks for the hint.

Highlighted on our to-do-list.

We are grateful for every idea/improvement/feature request we receive! This helps us creating plug-ins that users really can use in production.

 

Version 0.9.0 available for download.

Changelog

Features

• Background pin script added
• Layer mask support added
• Auto aspect ratio correction

Changes

• Positioning improved in render pipeline

 

Great! Auto aspect ratio works.
But "lens dirt" and "ghosts mask" seem not to be corrected, maybe because these are texture based effects?! Against expectations "ghost masks" are correct if auto aspect ratio is off!?

Just a small note: flares do not update correctly in the Editor, only if I click into the viewport / change viewport size / change parameters it will show up for a very short time). Even with "ForceRerender" enabled flares are not shown correctly anytime. Editing the flares in "Play mode" works perfectly!

win7 64bit, GTX670 / GTX980, Unity 5.2 + 5.3, EasyFlares 0.9.0

 

The lens dirt component is not procedural it has just a dynamic luminance layer.

Thats because Easy Flares does not use scene meshes to render, therefore the Unity editor does only update/rerender on scene/UI changes. We'll improve the "Force Rerender" option in the next cycle.

 

Thanks!

maybe you could have a look at those 2 comments, too:

• linear color space: could you add a colorspace adjustment ( automatic or checkbox for linear & gamma) as the flares look kind of poor in linear color space. All flare parameters need to be changed if in linear colorspace, also it is not possible to get the same high quality results in linear
  
• lens ghost mask: does not work correctly if "correct aspect" is enabled (mask will be streched). lens ghost mask is correct if this feature is disabled

 

We'll add linear color space support in the next release.

Thanks for the report.

 

Version 0.9.0 available for download.

Changelog

Fixes

• Occlusion inaccuracy fixed
• Wrong aspect correction on lens ghosts fixed

Features

• Occlusion layer mask support added
• Debug occlusion rays
• Flare Preview Editor added (Only Unity 5)
• Linear color space support. Custom presets need be adjusted (Only Unity 5)

 

Version 0.9.5 available for download. Full changelog can be found here.

Changelog

Changes

• Preview: Reduced size of backdrop in preview window.
• Structure: Harmonized package structure across all shared libraries.

Features

• Core: Added overall opacity property.
• Core: Added support for Unity 5.6.

 

Great that it's procedural! But I can't find any docs regarding API for actually setting anything at runtime.

Another question: is the position of the flare determined in any way by the transform of the RenderCamera? Because while I need the flare rendered on the final camera, it's position should be based on the background camera. This is something that Unity's flares don't seem to handle (but can be faked by kludging the position of the LensFlare objects).

 

Hi! For some unknown reasons, we forgot to publish the API.
It's now accessible on the Easy Flares plugin page here.

The position of the flare emitter is in world space and independent of the camera. Only when it comes to rendering the flare on the "camera's lens" the actual transform is evaluated. We have included an example showing a fixed background flare. But that covers maybe not your exact use case. Keep me updated.

 

The "correct aspect" toggle appears to toggle between Wrong (only circular on square display) and Very Wrong (only circular on portrait display). Is it supposed to work?
Edit: it seems that it's the Halo Size parameter that's weird: it only affects the Y size of the halo: at 6 it is equal to X size (and so round), whereas at 0.01 it is distorted by the screen proportions. This is not resolution independence.

Unity flares have a "brightness" control (scales and brightens elements). Is there an equivalent in EasyFlaresPro?

 

Hey Waz. Thank you for your active contribution.

We'll have a good look at this issue.

EF currently only exposes an Opacity value. This does affect the overall intensity of the flare.

 

Can you please release it with source code now that Unity supports separate Assemblies? It's seeming high-risk to use Easy Flares without source code, and I'm happy to contribute fixes, so it's win-win.

 

You can download the source code form the website. Just log in and bind your UAS order number to your account.

 

Every contribution is highly appreciated.