At first glance Optical Flares reminds me of Zaxwerks ProAnimator. A beautifully designed box pops up and the user has the option of designing custom lens flares from scratch. All sorts of lens objects are at your disposal: glows, irises, glints, spike balls, sparkles, even custom textures. Each object can be layered on top of the previous object multiple times. Additionally each object has its own set of unique and customizable properties while still being controlled by global parameters.
Pull lens objects from the right side, and drag them to your stack on the left. Notice the option to hide or solo each element. They designed the suite to work intuitively and similar to After Effects.
While this is all very impressive, what concerned me more was how the lens flares worked within a real project. This, to me, is where the fun of Optical Flares really begins. While traditional 2D lens flares are the default setting, Optical Flares stands out in that its lens objects are 3D compatible. This means they work together realistically in 3D space. If that isn't cool enough, the ability to effortlessly track the flares to your After Effects lights takes Optical Flares far beyond what is possible to do in After Effects alone, without relying on a ton of effort. This makes creating effects like a wall of lights or realistically recreating stage light setups possible. You can even track lens flares to real footage (the example they use is tracking the headlight of a moving vehicle and adding a realistic flare directly to it).
Too many design options to show.
Depth of Options
There is an EXTREME amount of options within this suite. Every single thing is customizable, and I highly recommend purchasing the eclectic collection of Pro Presets along with the plugin. At a great price you'll get nearly double the amount of great looking flares to start designing with.
