Couple of compositor questions:

1) Assuming a series of .pic files with multiple layers, what's the right way to break those out in the compositor? In other words I'd like to separate them and then do some sort of processing on a specific layer (for example blurring the emissions/Ce layer) and then combine them back together again.

2) Lens flares. How does one achieve this in COPs? I've looked around and haven't found squat. If this has to be custom written, any suggestions on how to do this or what's involved?

There's a lensflare atmospheric shader floating around somewhere on the mail archive - have a look there. Render it separately and load using renderCOP.

For the first point, use the channel copy node to separate your channels and also for bring them back in one multichannel file.

For the second point, search in the great book Advance RenderMan page 320 Section 12.7 Lens Flare and “Clipping Plane” Shaders.

jimc
Couple of compositor questions:
1) Assuming a series of .pic files with multiple layers, what's the right way to break those out in the compositor? In other words I'd like to separate them and then do some sort of processing on a specific layer (for example blurring the emissions/Ce layer) and then combine them back together again.

You can set the channel mask on the operations you want to restrict to certain layers as well, if you're only doing a node or two's worth of work. This is on the Mask page.

kuba
There's a lensflare atmospheric shader floating around somewhere on the mail archive - have a look there. Render it separately and load using renderCOP.

Yeah I found it! Holy crap that's amazing, both in how easy it is to get to work, and the huge number of controls you have over the material. Uber Cool!

Anyone have any experience using the lensflare shader that kuba mentions?

Here's some results I got so far:



Something isn't quite right, but I'm not sure what it is.