After Effects Tutorial: Custom LENS FLARES with No Plugins

Express your inner J.J. Abrams without having to buy 3rd Party Plugins. In this After Effects tutorial, create custom lens flares without any plugins. SonduckFilm will teach you how to create amazing lens flares within After Effects without Optical Flares or Knoll Light Factory. Lens flares are used frequently within motion graphic projects to enhance the visuals and make certain elements pop. It can be hard to use the standard Adobe After Effects lens flares with their default settings. Buying third-party plugins can be tempting, however after watching this tutorial, you will be able to create awesome lens flares with the built-in effects.

Download Project Files Here:

Social Media:

Suggested After Effects Tutorials:

[j.juanpaiz]

OMG! I just started learning after effects for a week. I saw your video and I decided to accept this challenge. LOL Your 8 min tutorial took me like 3 hours to make a lens flare! English is not even my native language so I had to play it like thousand times but at the end I made it! I managed to make my own lens flare! Ready to be used for the next after effects challenge! Thanks man! You must been good, otherwise I would have never made it!😄

[Ren-gcnq]

i love your tutorials man, this is way better than any other lens flare tutorials 4 years later!

[glacierice]

Definitely a helpful tutorial. One thing I noticed that also happened to you. When linking the whip to the position in the null layer, your angled flares matched the position exactly. This meant the angled flares disappeared instead of staying where they were. To combat that, you'll need an offset at the end of the transform position text. "-[50, 100] (Play around with the numbers until you are happy with the offset distance.)

[diontethames]

You have no idea how long I’ve been looking for a tutorial like this, thanks a million

[thomaskerrigan]

for anyone who wants to make that flare background transparent change the mode to "screen" . I hope this saves people some time

[solokain]

dude, you dont know how helpful (and shorts, thanks too) these videos have been for my job, thanks man

[Diegosees]

Thank you for the upload! Great tutorial and easy to follow. I had an issue with the center of the lens flare separating from the other streaks when paired to the position of the null and moved around. One fix I found was also parenting the anchor point of the lens flare to the null object :)

[TheRealStevenBritton]

WHOA... SLOW DOWN THERE, GONZALES! Extremely helpful tutorial, but my goodness do you go through it fast. I lost count of the number of times I had to pause, rewind, and start again.

[douginnocent]

I have been looking for this forever. Thank you Sonduck!

[addycool]

its crt and drag to create that shape at 2:19 for me that worked

[sashomedia]

This is more than small tutoral. This is awesome tutorial! Thanks for sharing

[Wesley-rkuq]

thanks for the tutorial my dude, it really helped! but how can i do it without the black background so i can use it in other projects?

[geniicube]

I think you just saved me $50
Nice work thank you

[LuminescentPictures]

Wow. Well done on speed, and the amount of clear and useful information.

[marcusspaur]

Thank you for sharing this video! This is exactly what I was looking for for a video I'm working on. I'm looking forward to learning more from you.

[fireflymedia]

Question: Once you have the flare, do turn it into a screen layer so the black goes away? How about if you want to make it a template and import the template into something like Premiere. How would you get rid of the black, would you screen it in Premiere?

[KeanusReal]

that was an amazing trick tutorial!! very useful!! great explanation clear and fast! 10/10!

[PhilAndersonOutside]

Good creative solution. I like the caffeinated pacing of this. Too many vids get bogged down in going over too many details, too many pauses.

[fireflymedia]

Brilliant! Liked that I not only learned the effect but how to tweek pickwhipped items. You rock!

[NintenZone]

This channel is amazing. It's helped me out tons!