LENS FLARES!!!!

[RizzoTheRat]

9 hours ago, razark said:

I also like liver and onions and think cheesecake is a horrid abomination that should not be

You realise this means your opinions are invalid? 

 

9 hours ago, mythbusters844 said:

What do you mean? It looks BEAUTIFUL!

That's pretty much what the traffic looked like through my glasses cycling home in the rain last night

[loch.ness]

9 hours ago, daniel l. said:

Thats not what i mean, Lens flares have a place... On bright things, You seem to have the idea that lens flares are to be spread around like random noise. 

A good use for a lens flare would be this:

I can almost get behind the flare on the sun except it seems far too large and two dimensional (as someone who also wears glasses all day long) - a smaller star-burst seems like it would be more appropriate if the sun was closer to coming out from behind earth's orbit and catching the viewer by surpise.  Having the effect just because its bright doesn't make much sense (its color and resulting shadows do that already).

 

I find the flare on the rocket's engine just plain silly though.

 

Also it is a pretty picture, but more for the level of detail.

 

I'd be happy with a slider that allows those who want 'em to have 'em but I'd be much happier with the time put into stock clouds, distant object enhancement and a skybox that when on the darkside of Mun captures the sheer majesty of the cosmos.

[tater]

9 hours ago, daniel l. said:

Would this picture be nearly as beautiful without them? The problem here is the grainyness of the image.

 

That is not a lens flare, they're a diffraction spikes. That telescope has 4 posts holding up the secondary mirror. If it had 3, there would be 3 rays.

The picture would be better without such artifacts. I'd turn it off in any game when I first loaded it up in settings without ever looking at it (as I would with lens flares). Yuck.

[Xavven]

This whole thread is like arguing over what flavor of ice cream is better.

[razark]

8 minutes ago, Xavven said:

This whole thread is like arguing over what flavor of ice cream is better.

Nah.

It's like arguing whether the ice cream is better with little bits of broken glass in it or not.

[Guest]

5 hours ago, sal_vager said:

It can always be modded out if you dislike it.

...uhh...

[Laie]

1 hour ago, Xavven said:

This whole thread is like arguing over what flavor of ice cream is better.

More like wether freckles are cute or disfiguring.

[pizzaoverhead]

Seeing as no one has mentioned it yet: There's another option for lens flares. You can recreate the same single-lens flares that the human eye sees. It can be more immersive in some cases.

Reading material:
http://people.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~ritschel/Papers/TemporalGlare.pdf
http://luthuli.cs.uiuc.edu/~daf/courses/Rendering/Papers3/spencer95.pdf
http://simonwinder.com/projects/simulation-of-lens-flare-in-the-human-eye/

 

[Vermil]

3 hours ago, tater said:

 

That is not a lens flare, they're a diffraction spikes. That telescope has 4 posts holding up the secondary mirror. If it had 3, there would be 3 rays.

The picture would be better without such artifacts. I'd turn it off in any game when I first loaded it up in settings without ever looking at it (as I would with lens flares). Yuck.

 

The first picture I ever saw of the Pleiades, didn't have them, and you're right. It was prettier.
As a photographer, I find that I both hate artificial lens flare effects, and that I hardly ever have any in my photographs, and then just weak, weak ghosts of the ridiculous blobs and rings provided in games and CG movies. Perhaps if more developers where photographers, we be spared this artificial effort to resemble optics from 1910, only they wouldn't have so many, because they didn't have so many elements in the lenses.  Everybody has a diffusion of strong light in the eye, but that's different.

tldr:  lens flares are crap content.

 

Edited March 3, 2016 by Vermil

[Renegrade]

 

I'm rather amazed that people can be impressed by what amounts to a semi-transparent, billboarded texture :/

 

13 hours ago, mythbusters844 said:

What do you mean? It looks BEAUTIFUL!

Not bad for a beginner, but if you want to become a REAL multi-billion dollar movie director, you'll need more horizontal diffraction going on.  Imagine a panel van grinding along a wall, and what it's paint job would look like after, and then invert the dark scrapes and scratches to being blinding light..and then crank that up to 11.

Only then will you have true mastery in the JJ style!  Let the hate flow through you!! BECOME ONE WITH THE (ironically named in this case) DARK SIDE!!!1!!!one1!!!eleventy!!11!!

*cough* ahem..

[Archgeek]

3 hours ago, razark said:

Nah.

It's like arguing whether the ice cream is better with little bits of broken glass in it or not.

Mmmmm, lightbulb-flavour.  My favourite part is the tungsten filaments.

[KerbonautInTraining]

14 hours ago, mythbusters844 said:

What do you mean? It looks BEAUTIFUL!

I'm trying so hard not to burst out laughing right now. 

I have no idea why I find this so funny

[daniel l.]

10 hours ago, sal_vager said:

KSP's stock lensflare isn't too bad, it's a lot subtler than the OP's, as you can see here.

It can always be modded out if you dislike it.

The problem is that it is extremely hard to mod. The devs need to extend the modding API to ocver flares. And btw what is your opinion on how the skybox is a dull grey even though the galaxy IRL is far more colorful?

[sal_vager]

Well, in real life the colours you see in space photos are from very long exposures, these colours are too faint to see with the naked eye, we only see some like the red of Betelgeuse due to just how much red it puts out

The beautiful colours of the horsehead nebula, and even the deep reds of Jupiter, only really show with photography, usually with their colours enhanced in some way.

While there is colour, most of it is lost on human eyes, without long exposures and colour filters, most of space really does look grey to us.

[Renegrade]

7 minutes ago, sal_vager said:

While there is colour, most of it is lost on human eyes, without long exposures and colour filters, most of space really does look grey to us.

Actually the grey is just overcast and smog and light pollution (you must live in Toronto too, eh?).  The night sky up north in the Kawarthas is a dark black (or maybe even slightly darker black) with colorful dots and this big smear of a galaxy.  It's really quite pretty.

[daniel l.]

12 minutes ago, sal_vager said:

Well, in real life the colours you see in space photos are from very long exposures, these colours are too faint to see with the naked eye, we only see some like the red of Betelgeuse due to just how much red it puts out

The beautiful colours of the horsehead nebula, and even the deep reds of Jupiter, only really show with photography, usually with their colours enhanced in some way.

While there is colour, most of it is lost on human eyes, without long exposures and colour filters, most of space really does look grey to us.

But isnt that from the surface? Pictures from space seem to show color....

Also:

Perhaps a sun flare more to peoples agreement

[Matuchkin]

18 hours ago, mythbusters844 said:

What do you mean? It looks BEAUTIFUL!

God bless this solar system! Let there be LIGHT!4

Edited March 3, 2016 by Matuchkin

[sal_vager]

Space is black, but stuff we see in space is largely devoid of its colour to our eyes, KSP is grey more due to texture compression, also your screen can have a big effect on it.

The skybox is a lot darker on my current monitor.

[Xyrus]

18 hours ago, mythbusters844 said:

It is a screen capture, it just has all that unnecessary camera artifacting that you're excited about.

Like honestly, why put effort into making the game look better when you can just spam lens flares everywhere?

J. J. Abrams would like a word with you.

[tater]

1 hour ago, sal_vager said:

Space is black, but stuff we see in space is largely devoid of its colour to our eyes, KSP is grey more due to texture compression, also your screen can have a big effect on it.

The skybox is a lot darker on my current monitor.

Cassini image of Jupiter. The left is as the naked eye would see it, the right has false color/saturation.

[sal_vager]

8 hours ago, tater said:

Cassini image of Jupiter. The left is as the naked eye would see it, the right has false color/saturation.

Cassini was much closer to Jupiter when that image was taken.

Look at Jupiter through a telescope, don't make false comparisons please.

 

[benjee10]

Basically my take on it is that I want my KSP to resemble real photos and images taken from space, hence I install all the beautification mods and stuff like hullcam VDS. And since real photos in space are taken with real cameras it makes sense to me to include the artefacts that cameras produce such as lens flares and bloom etc. If there was a mod for realistic chromatic aberration (subtle, as in real photographs, not that horrendous rainbow-edged stuff that people slap on their first blender renders) I'd have that installed too. It's probably because I'm coming from a primarily film & animation based background so I tend to want to emulate those things to make my renders look more realistic or blend them into live action better. Personally I find lens flares to be rather beautiful when used right, and, since our eyes are lenses, can't see why they shouldn't be present to at least some degree. I wouldn't want to force full anamorphic flares on anyone though. 

The stock sun flare is utterly obnoxious though. Not only is it ugly as sin but it doesn't behave like a real lens flare should and goes behind planets and ships. The game should at the very least a decent glow/bloom effect for the Sun which works correctly and draws in front of things instead of behind them with perhaps a toggleable lens flare (& definitely more mod support). 

For now I'll stick with scatterer's flare since it pretty much works correctly and manages to be both beautiful and subtle at the same time. 

[Matuchkin]

3 hours ago, sal_vager said:

The skybox is a lot darker on my current monitor.

I actually completely removed my skybox, via distant object enhancement. That greatly improves the immersiveness of the game. Mainly, it is because of the lack of a horrible skybox, but it also "isolates" the Sun, surrounding it with a black void instead of a massive black-grey-white background. That way, you can clearly see rays, lens-flares, etc.

It looks awesome.

[Sandworm]

For people's love of flare, take a moment to look into how much effort is put into avoiding such artifacts.  No camera maker is ever proud of seeing the internal mechanisms of their device in the final product.  The fact that we now add simulated flare under the assumption that all cameras must flare all the time has generations of engineers spinning in their graves,

Edited March 4, 2016 by Sandworm

[Superfluous J]

24 minutes ago, Matuchkin said:

 

Sorry for this but could you remove or at least severely limit your "Location" attribute? It made your post about 1000% longer than it needed to be, all whitespace.