Lens Glare or flare

[romullus]

Glare, flare, vignette... those are post render effects. Most likely i'd leave it for post anyway, just like i do with tonemapping. But for preview purposes, why not.

I'd ask for some lower hanging fruits like a more flexible bokeh setup with a rounding option, falloff, distortions and rotations close to the frame border.

Already asked ;]

[Juraj]

I kept doing custom tone-mapping for about 2 years. Then I started working on projects spanning 20 pictures and multiple rounds of full iteration. Now I do as much as I can in 3D. The more it's finished from framebuffer, the better. At best, I wish to do artistic touches in post, not completing the image into its photo-realness.

It's great to know all the love about rigid, super-flexible workflow, but the future is heading into fully-automatic way of everything. The sooner it will be here the better, the one who will do it first will be the winner.

[peterguthrie]

agree with Juraj (we probably have similar workflows)

the thought of having to run every render through photoshop makes me feel unwell

[Ondra]

VFB overhaul is on our list... so sometimes in 2016 ;)

[nauticus25]

I agree that it would be great to have these lens effects built-in, but only if they're controllable the way tonemapping currently is in the frame buffer.  I don't want to crank out test renders just to dial in the amount of glare / vignetting.  I've never used Vray, so perhaps that's how they handle it and that's what everybody's talking about, but in mental ray it was a post-render effect so you had to wait until the render was done to see how it turned out.  If it wasn't right, you had to render again and wait some more.  I don't like waiting.

Someone mentioned multi-light, so I just want to give a big +1000 for that.  I really like being able to modify the intensities of separate lights interactively in Photoshop and it saves a ton of re-render time when working with our electrical engineers and architects.  But setting up all the light passes is time consuming.  Getting the passes for "free" like the VrayLightSelect render element would be fantastic.

[atelieryork]

Agree completely with the workflow to try to get everything nailed in the VFB. Just makes far more sense to me to do things this way. Makes life so much simpler when clients make changes or when you want to get out a load of shots from a single scene, which I'm doing more and more these days.

Looking forward to these VFB enhancements.

[daniel.reutersward]

I fully agree! I don´t have much experience with VrayLensEffects but I´ve been using Octane Render for a couple of months now and the ability to have vignette/glare/bloom during and after rendering is great!
No more having to go in to PS,  use ArionFx, find out that I need to go back and change the intensity of my spotlights, render again and so on just to get the bloom/glare at a good level both from windows and spotlights.

[vkiuru]

Is there vignetting in corona yet? if not that would be very high up my wishlist... and for the same reasons Juraj mentioned when talking about glare/bloom. When done in post vignetting often just doesnt look as good as it should do because its often done on a LDR image. Vray has vignetting on by default - I dont want to get into a debate on whether that is a good idea or not, but I find it interesting that probably 95% of the time I leave it on.

Apologies if vignetting has already been added, just coming back to corona after 2 or 3 massive vray projects!

Well, it hasn´t been implemented yet and I think the general response re:glare/bloom/vignetting has been that these are things to be done in post. Right now I think the development is getting too fixated on keeping things "simple" (focusing solely on building a ray-tracer like Juraj mentioned) and the interface tidy. Which of course is a good, checking things aren´t getting too bloated from time to time, but I´m starting to feel now that the core features are pretty much there the mentality is starting to get restrictive.

Ondra: A year (or two?) ago "multilight" was not strictly off the table, at least it was introduced as an option in a poll on the subject of most wanted features. Could this be further explored? Consider it this way: you´re constantly looking for things to make the rendered faster? Having the option to change individual light intensity/turn on or off/ change the color of, in frame buffer, would mean I could render a 30 minute preview render and get nearly infinite amount of different moods out of it and to my client. That´s a pretty significant speed improvement, no? :)

[antanas]

 Hi people, as much as I too would want to see all those mentioned post and notsopost effects like multilight directly in corona's vfb, for now the only good\useable solution is VFB+ which you can test\buy at http://www.monotoneminimal.com/vfb/featureset , and that one is not just a compromise for the time being but is already quite good as it is or at least is good enough for me.
Why? Well :
 Zdepth based dof (one of the best I've seen - even comparable to a lenscare's results), vignetting, render history (with a\b version split slider), bloom effect, chromatic aberrations, quite good color corrections, lut and icc support, nice filmic tonemapping and even a f***ing glorious firefly reduction filter which can save a lot of rendertime in some cases - it is almost like some sort of adobe camera raw\lightroom\arionFx on steroids directly inside 3ds max + you can save all those adjustment as a presets for later use like in those three. Plus it is quite affordable and easy to use and I think it is no less than a must have for any daily max user and it is independent of used renderer as it is render agnostic and work as some sort of a native max's framebuffer's extension.
 Though the native corona multilight or maybe, some even better than that of a vfb+'s implementation of those abovementioned effects would be of course quite welcome, I think the team should concentrate on more important tasks like, render to texture support or out of core rendering as those two are really important missing features right now which can be keeping some people away from Corona.       

[Juraj]

Ha, forgot about that. I wanted to test it maybe 3 times and always forget..

looks amazing

[antanas]

Ha, forgot about that. I wanted to test it maybe 3 times and always forget..

looks amazing

It not just looks amazing it IS amazing ))

[dubcat]

VFB+

I just watched the product demo, damn it looks nice. When the video was over I thought to myself, well, time to empty my wallet. Then i scrolled up and saw the price was 19$, what a steal. Gonna buy it straight away and give it a try. I've been using ArionFX. Thanks for spreading the word.

[Juraj]

20 dollars, it's steal :- )

[Juraj]

Antanas, maybe stupid question from my side, but how do you save with correct gamma from classic framebuffer (with VFB+) ? No matter what I do I end up with double-gamma .exr ....

Non-linear files (jpeg, tiff) work, simply by speccing them as 2.2 override (because internally 3dsMax decided the internal gamma for output is 2.2, no longer is this value exposed, and automatic gets it right only inside Corona framebuffer). This changes randomly based on my old scenes, maybe I should rewrite it finally in ini to stay 1.0 dammit. Because 3dsMax just doesn't want to remember it...

But why doesn't override gamma work ? It doesn't matter what I write there, it will save with 2.2 (or whatever is internal based on the current scene). only. wtf

[peterguthrie]

Tried vfb+ and while it has some great features, I'd much rather just have glare/bloom vignetting and curves in the corona vfb.

I reckon a couple of extra options won't hurt the simplicity of it :)