Abstract

The lens flare phenomenon is often an undesired artifact of the imaging process; however, it has become an important artistic tool in photography and cinematography as well as a highly impactful component for increasing the level of realism for computer-generated images. In this paper, we present a novel method for efficiently simulating the lens flares of optical camera systems in highly interactive environments. Recreating this effect in a physically correct way necessitates the use of ray tracing, which we made much more computationally efficient by using a tiled approach to rasterize the ghosts of the lens flare. One of the main drawbacks of the current state-of-the-art method is the huge pixel overdraw resulting from the large number of ghosts being rasterized individually onto the output image. The problem is made even worse when dense ray grids are utilized for improving the quality of the simulation. We overcome these limitations by collecting all the ray-traced ghost data into screen-aligned tiles and accumulating the per-pixel contributions in a single pass. We demonstrate that our tiled approach significantly outperforms the previous algorithm, scales much better with the number of flares rendered, and facilitates the efficient simulation of lens flares in real-time applications, while maintaining the physical correctness.

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