I wish to add some bloom effects for a light source that is translating from totally obscure to totally visible.

We have noticed that in film plus the DV footage we shot, that there is a blooming effect of the light source.

We know of other tools that is able to generate similar effects.

http://www.hash.com/htmlHelp/v10.5/CustomHtml/Post_Plugins.htm [hash.com]

We are giving a talk about Houdini and as such, would like to use the Houdini tool set to achieve our goals.

Any suggestion as to how we can go about it.

We have access to the Apprentice Edition of Houdini.

Cheers
–
Nicholas Yue

I think what you're looking for is the Defocus COP. (Called Bokeh in photography terms?). However, I don't think it made it into 6.1. Someone else could probably give a better answer.

I haven't tried this but do-it-yourself approximation might be to pass your image through a Mono COP, then LumaKey to only keep only the bright areas, blur, adjust contrast. Now apply this as the mask input to the original image using a Blur COP. Turn on Accurate Mask Blur. The idea is to blur the brighter areas more than the darker areas.