Lentil Offers Faster and Better Lens Effects in Arnold

Lentil Offers Faster and Better Lens Effects in Arnold

Lentil gives Arnold physical lens optics like bokeh, plus creative control.

Lens effects like blur and bokeh look beautiful, but let’s face it, they are expensive to render. Some people think that lenses in path tracers are largely ignored, and one of those people took action.

Zeno Pelgrims launches an advanced camera toolkit for Arnold on different platforms. Lentil is a set of camera shaders that can extend your creative control over lenses while significantly reducing render times too.

Faster Camera Blur and Bokeh With Arnold.

Lentil separates camera rays in a render from primary rays and uses bidirectional adaptive sampling for bokeh makes things like rendering depth of field effects practical in-camera. “We’ve seen speed-ups of ~30x on tough scenes, such as defocused sharp reflections or small light sources.”

“Thin-lens is an approximation that is designed to be as fast as possible. Polynomial optics uses real lens data and is both optimized for physical accuracy and speed (but it’s slower than the thin lens).”

Zeno says, “If you want sharp bokeh, small bright highlights need to be sampled. This is a tricky scenario for Arnold. Lentil is designed to give Arnold a hand here. AA samples can be left low, and bokeh will be supersampled without tracing each camera ray through the whole scene.”

Lentil’s Thin Lens Model Offers:

  • Many times faster than default Arnold camera (~30x), achieved by decoupling camera rays from primary rays
  • Empirical Cateye bokeh (optical vignetting)
  • Anamorphic bokeh
  • Image-based bokeh
  • Add additional luminance to bokeh only
  • Circle to square transitions (useful for anamorphic looks)
  • Coma aberration

The camera toolkit also offers Polynomial Optics, a state-of-the-art in fast, physically plausible lens simulation. “This camera model uses real lens data, but precalculates it in a way that all information about the lens is discarded. This means there is no performance difference between a lens with 5 or 25 optical elements.”

Get Lentil for Arnold.

Lentil camera toolkit works with Arnold under any DCC platform with tailored interface files for MtoA, HtoA & C4dToA. KtoA and MaxtoA. 

You need a minimum Arnold requirement of Core:6.1.0.0, MtoA 4.1.0, C4dtoA 3.2.0, HtoA 5.5.0.0 and MaxtoA 4.2.0.55. Visit lentil.xyz to get a copy.

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