Ray traced bokeh for Nuke, After Effects and DaVinci Resolve.
Ray traced bokeh for Nuke, After Effects and DaVinci Resolve.
Higx Optics renders bokeh by ray tracing a real lens design instead of stamping a flat blur. The result is bokeh that looks organic and with character.
Nuke
After Effects
DaVinci Resolve
Light is traced through a multi-element lens built from a published prescription. The bokeh is what that glass makes of it, not a flat disc pushed around the frame.
Cat's-eye and swirl towards the corners. Every pixel also gets its own coma tail, astigmatic stretch and field curvature, all moving as focus racks. The glass does it, not a mask.
Use the native aperture or feed in an image of your own. The front filter is where dirt and scratches live, and it can act as a lens hood, cutting the corner bokeh into cat's-eye.
Impression, Coma, Zonal Ripple, Lobes and chromatic aberration are real optical errors dialled into the lens, not effects painted on top. They flip across focus and vanish where the shot is sharp.
The whole trace runs on the GPU, so previews are fast.
The same renderer in Nuke, After Effects and DaVinci Resolve. One licence covers all three.
The look Roger Deakins had a lens rebuilt for, a clean centre with highlights that stretch and turn as they leave it. Here it comes out of the lens controls, with nothing painted on.
Inspired by the ARRI Impression filters, a diopter behind the lens that adds definition to the edge of every disc or softens it away. Negative softens them into creamy discs, positive draws them as bright-rimmed bubbles.
Stretches each disc into a comet, from nothing at the centre of the frame to full strength in the corners. The sign decides which way the tail points.
Pulls the edge highlights into lines, pointing at the centre on one side of focus and wrapping around it on the other. The middle of the frame is left alone.
Stretches the discs the way an anamorphic lens does, for a plate that has already been desqueezed.
How far into the frame the lens's edge character reaches. At 0 the whole frame gets the clean bokeh of the centre. At 2 the cat's-eye and swirl of the corners are pulled in toward the middle.
Lifts the highlights before the bokeh is rendered, so speculars bloom into discs instead of staying flat. Nothing else in the frame changes.
Where highlights meet they add up, fold and pile on top of each other, the way light does on a sensor. A stamped shape only ever sits next to another stamped shape.
A layer of drops bends the bokeh behind it, at its own depth. Rack focus onto the drops and the distortion sharpens with them.
Sparkle added into the discs from a layer at its own depth, so each highlight twinkles on its own as focus racks.
An out-of-focus object in front of the lights takes a bite out of every disc behind it, the way a real foreground eclipses real light. A flat blur only darkens the area.
OKEH is the part of the picture the lens draws on its own. Everything outside the plane of focus is shaped by the glass: the outline of the iris, the way each element bends light towards the corners, the small errors ground into every surface. A blur filter knows none of this. It stamps one shape across the frame and calls the result depth. Higx Optics does what the lens does. Light is traced through a real design, element by element, and the glass decides what a point of light becomes. The look is not an imitation, it is the consequence of a lens.
NukeAfter EffectsComing soonDaVinci ResolveComing soonOne licence covers Nuke, After Effects and DaVinci Resolve on a machine.
Pick the tier that fits how you work. Buy once, keep it forever.
It renews yearly for another year of updates until you cancel.
For individuals and small companies under $1M in annual revenue.
For companies of any size.
For a whole studio.
The price renews yearly through Gumroad until you cancel. Each renewal adds a year of updates, including support for new releases of Nuke, After Effects and DaVinci Resolve. Cancelling switches nothing off: every build released while you were paying keeps working for as long as you like, on any machine you activate, and the last build you are entitled to stays available to download for as long as Higx offers the product. Renew again later and you pick up the updates from there.
Full system requirements and the user guide.