3D Lens Flares

With a bit of spare time on my hands, I decided to play with something that’s always been on my mind, and that’s anaglyph 3D. I have the tools to (sort of) do it, and youtube has its 3D playback feature, so it was about time that I had a go.

What particularly inspired me was a single shot in Avatar (what else?). Nothing fancy, just a landscape establishing shot with a bit of pan, but the lens flare was in 3D. It’s kind of hard to explain, I guess, but the individual elements of the flare seemed to inhabit a unique area of depth. Having thought about it for a bit, I figured that the creation of such a thing would be easy. Here’s the result:

Of course, you can’t really watch this without some 3D Glasses, and it will look better in high definition, obviously!

All the same, I found that going 3D adds several more steps to your workflow. Creating the animation, with all the flares, was really easy — the work of an hour or so. It then took me several hours to tweak things so that the 3D works properly, and I must confess that my result is less than stellar. Still, that’s what experimentation is for!

UPDATE: Oh, also, I used Video Copilot’s Optical Flares plugin to generate the flares. But that was obvious!