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Probably the last enhancement on our bucket list of cinematic lighting enhancements for

today is lens flares, the lens flare occurs when the hard light bounces around the lens barrel,

it is considered by some cinematographers as a mistake even and others adore it, for us CG

makers it's a nice way to balance out the image so it doesn't feel overly sharp, not to mention

that it unifies the composition together and adds that authenticity and grittiness to the image, the

kind of grittiness that helps to ground our CG lighting elements in some photographic truth.

we will explore the technique that doesn't involve any third-party add-ons for Blender, but that being

said there are some awesome lens flares add-ons that you can find on Blender Market that may help

you to recreate this beautiful optical light aberration within the lens, so the paid add-on

path is definitely worth considering if you want to have access to the ready-made presets and

stuff like that and meanwhile we will simulate this awesome photographic phenomenon using the

vanilla Blender tools. without a further delay I'm gonna navigate to one of the project files, one of

the .blend files with a lens flare effect and in just a moment I will copy paste it into our

mineral scene and it will probably look gorgeous right out of the box, but first let's see how the

shader is set up. here's a trick for achieving the non-occluding additive effects such as flame or

lens flares for that matter, what we do is *add* two shaders together, like emission and transparent

bsdfs here using the add shade node in Cycles. this makes the material look like pure emission without

actually occluding anything. all right so Ctrl C, copy objects... jumping right back into our scene

and after creating a new collection obviously named flares_01 I'm gonna

paste the flare, so Ctrl V... but the question is where should it be located in this scene?

again the excess optical aberration such as lens flare occurs right inside the lens

barrel when hard light and resides and bounces around unpredictably, in other words it happens

right near the sensor. of course this presumption like any other rule in computer graphics can be

broken, but generally we would want this lens flare object to sit right on top of our camera object.

so I'm selecting the lens then shift click on the camera, Ctrl C and copying out its location

and rotation. so the plane with our lens flare occupies the same position in space as the camera

sensor... and then we can press G and Z two times to move it back and forth alongside its local

z-axis, this is the easier way to slide it back and forth to control the proximity to the sensor.

what we can do then is flood the entire top portion of the screen with this anamorphic

streak by scaling it up and it's up to you whether you want a soft glow or a totally

overpowering cinematic lens flare JJ Abram's style. well, some cinematographers and 3D artists

for that matter like to keep the picture as pristine and digital and clinical as possible

without mistakes or artifacts like lens flares, but chances are maybe you are from the other camp :)

all right because I want to give it a certain tint I'm adding the mix node in between the lens flare

texture and the emission shader and what I'm doing here is multiplying the lens flare texture by this

orangey color or if you wish so, you can... you can make it a classic blue anamorphic sci-fi streak :)

personally I... I don't want to mess with the warmer color palette of this image, so I

will probably keep it yellowish-orangish, I think this optical aberration really helps to unify the

lighting in our scene somehow, it not only tames the contrast and brings all colors together a

little bit, it also... how should I put it... helps us to tap into the photographic truth behind the

image formation, the gorgeous light flood artifact is not only aesthetically pleasing at least in my

opinion, it also connotes the real construction of the lens elements, you know that there are

some sophisticated lens elements stacked into layers letting the light bounce around it, this

suggestion alone that there are bigger picture at play adds a much needed depth into our CG lighting

formula and the presence of such layers of depth is just cinematic. all right, awesome!

that's so that was the last minute addition to our bucket list of cinematic lighting techniques for

rendering any kind of still lives and object shots, now it's time to go through the render

settings, render this thing out and then recap the steps that we have taken throughout this tutorial.