I love the effect of rays and volumetric light and that is why I gave it a shot to make the effect in Shake.

The basic idea is pretty straightforward. You got a “light source” and position a radial (actually zoom-) blur behind it and adjust the colors, and luminance and other stuff… the broadness of the shine/rays is defined by the distance of the source of the radial blur from the “light source”. This is easily adjustable in a static shot (or a shot with not much movement).

So I wanted to figure out how I could attach the rBlur to like a track of the light source and still have the correct width of the shine. That is where I came up with the directSpread macro.

The basic idea is defining two points:

• the light source
• direction

and then position the rBlur source for a certain amount behind the light source in the opposite direction from the direction point. And in addition, I added an option to calculate the relative distance between the points and adjust the distance for the rBlur source according to that.

There was quite some equations in there.

Watch directSpread.mov

If you think this is useful, then download this macro and test it out.

Download directSpread.zip