Fake Bokeh

Unfortunately there's no great way to do a live Bokeh effect, but we can do a reasonable facsimile with a lot of other effects. Actually its pretty heavy process wise, but it should render out on most moderately fast modern machines. I expect there will be an effect that does the same eventually, but doing it like this does get you some good experience at hacking the editor to do what you want.

As you might guess a good starting place is particles. Placed smack dab in the middle of the layout.





We don't need a bunch of them as we want the particles to stay on screen for quite a while.
Continuous spray works nicely here.
Also take note that we use a Sprite to take advantage of its properties.











Basically we spawn the particles all over the layout, and let the Particle emitter take care of the movement, and speed.














We can also take advantage of the Opacity randomizer to add the flicker effect.
Again note the timeout is super long.















The sprite can be placed anywhere on the layout since its basically a dummy.





A quirk of the method puts the effects on the sprite, rather than the layer, so make sure the sprite has a huge alpha border to get the blur and glow right.















The Sprite has Sine behavior to set each ones blur.
This lets us randomize the effects easier.
















Yep, each sprite has 4 effects.
The hamsters are getting a workout today.
















We also have a fade since sprites just popping in just doesn't go with the effect. We will add an event to deal with that properly.














Speaking of events:
+ System: On start of layout: -> Particles: Fast-forward 30 seconds
Use the fast forward again to avoid having to wait to populate the screen a bit. You will still see a fade in however.

+ System: Every 0.5 seconds
-> Sprite: Set effect "BlurHorizontal" parameter 0 to Sprite.Sine.Value
-> Sprite: Set effect "BlurVertical" parameter 0 to Sprite.Sine.Value
Use every n seconds to save a bit of processing. 
You really don't need it to set it every tick.


+ Sprite: On created
-> Sprite: Set color to rgb(170, 146, 178)
-> Sprite: Set opacity to 0
-> Sprite: Fade: start fade
Like I said it looks weird to just have sprite pop in.

Find the source here








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