Lens Effects Filters

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.

Rendering menu > Video Post > Video Post toolbar > (Add Image Filter Event) > Choose a Lens Effects Filter from the Filter Plug-In list.

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.

Warning: When 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.