Bloom and Lens Flares
The Bloom and Lens Flares image effect adds image based bloom and automatically generates lens flares (Image based lens flares should be cast based on bright parts of the color buffer, so it's very performant to provide a built in lens flare system here). It can drastically enhance the feel and look of your scene. This effect is a more modern version of the older Glow image effect with a more fine grain control over various glow parameters.
Example use of Bloom and Lens Flares demonstration a very soft glow using the new Screen blend mode and how the new anamorphic lens flares can easily create a more cinematic feeling.
As with the other image effects, this effect is only available in Unity Pro. Make sure to have the Pro Standard Assets installed.
Properties
| Mode | Choose complex mode fore more tweaking options such as enabling lens flare. |
| Blend mode | How to add the bloom to the color buffer. The softer Screen blend is better at keeping bright image parts alive. |
| Intensity | The global light intensity of the added light (affects both, bloom and lens flares). |
| Threshhold | The global light intensity threshhold that defines which image parts are being considered for blooming (and lens flares creation). |
| Blur iterations | The smoothness of the bloom and flares. Remember that more iterations result in a more expensive effect. |
| Blur spread | The global, resolution independent spread (width) of the effect. |
| Use alpha mask | How much you want to have the alpha channel act as a mask for the bloom effect. |
| Cast lens flares | Enable or disable lens flares. |
| Mode | The kind of lens flares that should be cast. Chose between Ghosting, Anamorphic or a combination of both. |
| Local intensity | Additional intensity for all lens flares. |
| Local threshhold | The additional light intensity threshhold that defines which image parts are being considered for lens flares. |
| Stretch width | The width for anamorphic lens flares. |
| Blur iterations | Defines the smoothness for anamorphic lens flares. |
| Tint Color | Color modulation for the anamorphic flare type. |
| 1st-4th Color | Color modulation for all additional lens flares when Ghosting or Combined is chosen. |
Hardware support
This effect requires a graphics card with pixel shaders (2.0) or OpenGL ES 2.0. PC: NVIDIA cards since 2003 (GeForce FX), AMD cards since 2004 (Radeon 9500), Intel cards since 2005 (GMA 900); Mobile: OpenGL ES 2.0; Consoles: Xbox 360, PS3.
All image effects automatically disable themselves when they can not run on end-users graphics card.
Page last updated: 2011-06-09