How do I create bloom and glare using V-ray?

Simple and relatively subtle lens effects do wonders for most images Mohammed Alishia, UK Paul replies Thankfully this is something that is easily achievable natively within V-ray. It is an effect that is applied in post which means it is only applied after the render has completed. This also means that the effect can be updated interactively as you change the lens effects settings without requiring a re-render. Brilliant!

V-ray’s lens effects are split into bloom and glare with different parameters for each. These can be found by going to the Vray Frame Buffer and selecting the button at the bottom called Vray Lens Effects. This will bring up a separate dialogue box. You will notice that it is split into two main sections, bloom and glare, with a check box at the bottom to make it interactive, and a button called Update effects, if you want to force it to update outside of an interactive context.

One thing to keep in mind: you are best off turning on the two effects with the two check boxes prior to rendering. This will ensure that the necessary render elements and source images are created. Firstly, we have the bloom. This effect produces fringes of light emanating from the edges of very bright areas in an image. This is a common effect captured by cameras in the real world. With the effect turned on simply adjust the Weight, Size and Shape of the bloom. This will affect the look of the effect. You then have the ability to apply a Bloom Mask to your effect. I only ever use the Intensity check box, which enables me to only apply the effect to pixels in the image that are of a certain brightness. You can sample the 32-bit colour values by going to the Lens Effect Source Render element.

Secondly, we have the glare. This has similar properties, but the most notable difference is that the glare can be driven either by the camera used for rendering or by bespoke camera parameters contained within the dialogue box. These include things like the number of blades and their rotation.

The beauty of these effects are that they are interactive, so just play around with the settings and be creative! Bloom and glare FX can be updated interactively as you change the lens effects settings, meaning there’s no need to re-render