- Hello and welcome.
My name is Ben Brownlee for Boris FX,
and in this quick tutorial,
we're gonna be looking at some of the different ways
to use occlusion layers in Sapphire's LensFlare
to automatically create better looking results
with no manual keyframes.
Occlusion layers are a great way
to get more naturalistic looking flares
out of Sapphire's LensFlare, but it can do more
than just block or expose where the flare is being shown.
So let's see how this project is set up at the moment.
I have my titles here, and my titles have an alpha channel.
Then on top of that, I have a black layer
with a lens flare put on top.
And my layer is set to screen mode
just to bring those two together.
Now, I can do this on one layer,
but I find that this gives me a little bit more flexibility.
So let's set up the occlusion layer
and see what the basics of occlusions do.
So in the Sapphire LensFlare effect,
we're gonna take occlusion from layer
and we're gonna choose the bottom layer here,
which is our layer with alpha.
Now, if I just drag this over,
we can see what happens by default.
If I go underneath the titles,
my flare is now being blocked.
As I come out from behind them,
my flare is being shown again.
Maybe I'll turn the flare width up a little bit here
so we can see this a little bit easier.
There we go, and as you can see,
if I just move it so it's just on the edge,
we get a bit of a fall off as things go behind there.
So it's not just a simple, straightforward on and off.
We do have a little bit of a fall off.
So let's look at what we can do with occlusions.
So if I come down into my occlusion parameter settings,
and I'm gonna reset my scale width as well
so that we can see this a bit easier, and I'll zoom in
and set us back to full res.
So these occlusion parameters are laid out
in the way that we want to probably use them.
So we have occlusion softness.
So if I set this down to zero,
and I'll just put it on the edge there,
you'll see that it just sits in.
We still do get a bit of that fall off
that we were seeing before,
but let's see what happens
when I bring my softness up a little bit.
We can see that's now drifting a little bit around.
So if I moved this from left to right,
you can see that instead of just having a straight edge,
it actually wobbles just a little bit as well.
And this can be great,
or maybe not such a high occlusion level,
but this can be used to just add a little bit more
sort of natural wrap when we're moving something
using an occlusion.
And we can set up whether we're occluding from the alpha,
from the luma, or from none,
so we don't even have to have an image
with an alpha channel,
we can just use regular video footage
and use the luma channel
to try to set up the occlusion there.
You see this works in a relatively the same way
with the luma channel,
because we do have a sort of black and white area,
but you'll notice that in this case,
when we're over an area that's not 100% white,
it doesn't block the flare 100%.
And this can be really useful
for just getting a kind of a soft lighting glow effect.
We're gonna build more on that idea in just a little bit,
but that's something we can do already here.
We can also choose to invert the occlusion.
So if I turn my occlusion back to alpha here,
so we can see is a bit better,
now you can see it's only occluding,
or actually only showing us the flare
when we're over the letters, otherwise it goes away again.
So again, this is a great way
of just sort of building in a nice bit of glow
into a piece of text without showing as a flare
when it's over the black background.
Now, what you'll also have noticed
is that when we're over these letters,
our flare has changed color.
And that's because of the next parameter,
which is use color.
If we don't want that, we want to keep the flare as it was,
we can just turn off the use color
and we maintain the original flare.
Now, the next controls are some of my favorites
when we're dealing with flares over motion graphics,
including text here, and that is the diffraction glow.
Now, the diffraction glow gives us the effect
of lighting up the surrounding area using the hotspot.
So if I turn my diffraction glow up a little bit,
I'll turn it up quite a lot so we can see it really easily.
Turn it to point a 0.27.
And if I just move my hotspot around,
what you'll see is I'm lighting up,
not just with the hotspot,
but I'm getting a glow that's going around
the surrounding area too.
And this is where things start getting fun,
because I can change up my glow width and my glow radius.
So if I take the glow width down,
you can see we're getting a much more contained area
of our glow, so we're only seeing this
over the A and the R in LENSFLARE.
Let's turn that up, and you can see,
now that's giving us a much more sort of diffuse area,
much more diffuse width,
so it's sort of blurring that out for us.
And then if I take my glow radius,
you can see how that's building out the glow
that's coming from that width.
So a nice little trick here,
if I have a quite high, so very high, diffraction glow,
I'm gonna set that to one,
and I'll take my other ranges down for a second,
can't set them to zero, because
that gives us a very different look than we want,
a zero on the the glow radius starts to glow everything out,
we don't really want that.
So we want that to sort of stay fairly low, but not zero.
And if you see here, with our glow width set to one
and our glow radius set to 15,
as we move this around, we're getting
just like a really nice metallic looking effect
as we move around here.
So If I bring the glow width up just a little bit as well,
maybe take that to about six,
and take the diffraction glow down,
you can start to see how we're getting a really nice look
as I trace the hotspot around the edge of the letters here.
And it only affects the letters
when the hotspot's over them,
because of course, we've got the occlusion layer
doing lots of the work to sort of block the hotspot out.
But it means that when we do go over them,
we get this gorgeous looking diffraction
as we go around the letters.
The final thing that I want to show you with occlusions
is occlusion triggers.
And these triggers work in the same way
as the edge triggers and the center triggers work.
So when this goes over something that's occluded,
we get a chance to scale the brightness and scale the width.
And we can see that,
maybe if I open up the parameters a little bit more,
you can see the entire word there.
So it means we get a little bit more movement
or a little bit more life
to our flair as it hits one of these triggers.
And the trigger in this case is the occlusion trigger.
Now, this is quite an extreme,
I say quite an extreme, it's a very extreme example there.
I might just take that down to 1.25.
I might even take my brightness downwards a little bit,
and we can just have this now scaling and moving around
as it hits the text.
Okay, I'm gonna get rid of this keyframe
'cause I've already keyframed up our hotspot here.
I'm just gonna do a quick RAM preview.
And now you can see we're using Sapphire's LensFlare
in a slightly different way
than just having a big old lens flare
floating across the text.
We're actually using it to highlight areas of the text
and give us that nice metallic look,
which I think works really nicely and is really cool.
And I know a lot of people
who are using Sapphire's LensFlare on almost a daily basis
still haven't really explored some of the things
that you can do with occlusion,
which is why I wanted to show you this.
Thanks for watching.
If you want to learn more about Sapphire's LensFlare,
or any of the Sapphire filters,
then head on over to borisfx.com.
You can find the latest product news, new tutorials,
and you can even download a free trial.
My name is Ben Brownlee for Boris FX,
and I'll see you again soon.