Halation

Halation — cinematic camera, motion and film emulation for Blender One click gives you a render ready camera: a film gauge, real depth of field, motion blur, a graded look and a full compositor chain. Every control then opens up as far as you want to go — Quick mode is six controls, Expert mode hides nothing. One click to a cinematic camera. Fifteen film gauges and digital sensors, eleven lens profiles, ten looks and six camera supports, all picked from galleries of rendered thumbnails. Real anamorphic. A squeezed negative with the squeeze carried in the pixel aspect, Desqueeze Preview, an oval bokeh that matches real glass, and a horizontal streak flare that stretches on desqueeze. Physical exposure. T-stop, ISO, shutter angle or shutter speed, an EV readout, hyperfocal distance and depth of field maths — driving the real render settings, not a preview overlay. Film emulation in the viewport. Grain, halation from light sources, bloom, flare, mist diffusion, aberration, distortion, vignette and gate weave, with no node wiring to do. Every amount is driver bound, so every effect keyframes. A pipeline, not just a look. Shot manager with marker bound cameras, burn in, JSON sidecars and EDL export, plus Export Look as LUT to a .cube for DaVinci Resolve or Premiere. Choose your edition Lite is free. Pick the Lite (free) version above if you want a complete single cinematic camera at no cost. Pick Pro for the film emulation depth, the motion toolkit and the shot pipeline. A scene saved in Lite opens in Pro with every selection intact, and both can be installed side by side — with Pro enabled, Lite stands down instead of clashing over the scene settings. Lite (free) Pro Formats Super 35, Super 35 16:9, Full Frame All fifteen gauges and sensors, anamorphic included Lens profiles Modern Prime, Vintage Prime All eleven, anamorphic, macro and fisheye included Looks Neutral, Print Contrast, Warm Negative All ten Shake presets Locked Off, Handheld, Steadicam All six, plus Bake to keyframes Effects Grain, Halation, Bloom, Vignette Adds Flare, Mist Diffusion, Gate Weave, Distortion, Chromatic Aberration, Vector Blur Colour Procedural looks Adds cube LUT import, LUT position, view transform check, Export Look as LUT Depth of field Engine bokeh from the lens profile Adds post bokeh shapes: triangle, square, donut, custom flaps Camera Moves — Vertigo, Orbit, Spiral, Push, Crane, Truck, Arc 180, Roll, Fly Through as editable curve paths Scopes Waveform, Histogram, HUD, framing guides, aspect mask Adds False Colour, Zebra, Focus Peaking in viewport and render Shots — Shot list, marker bound cameras, per shot settings, thumbnails, burn in, JSON and EDL export Presets — Save, load and the bundled preset library Interface modes Quick, Standard Quick, Standard, Expert Formats and lenses Picking a format writes the sensor size onto the camera and sets the render resolution to match the gate; the panel reports sensor width by height in millimetres, the projected aspect and the crop factor against full frame. Super 35, 8mm, Super 8, 16mm, Super 16, 35mm Academy, Super 35 16:9, Anamorphic 2x, VistaVision, 65mm, IMAX 15/70, Full Frame, Full Frame 16:9, APS-C and Micro Four Thirds. Picking a lens profile sets distortion, vignette, aberration and flare in one move: Modern Prime, Vintage Prime, Wide Prime, Long Prime, Production Zoom, Soft Portrait, Anamorphic 1.33x, Anamorphic 1.5x, Anamorphic 2x, Macro and Fisheye. Each profile carries a minimum focus distance, and Halation warns you when focus goes closer than the glass can. Exposure and focus T-stop, ISO and shutter angle or shutter speed, kept in sync, with an EV readout. Focus by Distance, by Target, or by Autofocus measuring the scene under a focus point you click inside the camera frame. Focus Time is the focus puller's lag in seconds; 0 snaps. Rack Focus keyframes a pull between two marks with Linear, Sine, Quadratic or Exponential easing, and keyframes the focal length too when Focus Breathing is up. Bokeh: Round, Bladed and Oval from the engine, plus Triangle, Square, Donut and Custom blurred in post from the depth pass. Motion Six camera supports — Locked Off, Tripod, Dolly, Crane, Steadicam, Handheld — as deterministic, seeded procedural shake with Frequency, Smoothing and per axis weighting. The pan and tilt are applied as lens shift, so the shake survives a Track To constraint, a follow path and every Halation camera move. Bake writes it to keyframes; Unbake takes it back. Nine camera moves — Vertigo, Orbit, Spiral, Push, Crane, Truck, Arc 180, Roll and Fly Through — built as real curve paths with a target empty and eased offset factor keys. Everything stays editable: drag the curve, edit its points, move the empty, or change Start, Duration, Easing and Reverse to re-key the move in place. Vertigo drives the focal length so the subject stays the same size while the camera travels — that is what produces the stretch. Remove Move puts the camera back exactly where it was. Look and the compositor Ten procedural looks: Neutral, Warm Negative, Cool Negative, Print Contrast, Bleach Bypass, Low Saturation, Complementary, Faded Archive, Mono Contrast and Mono Soft — with an intensity blend, contrast, saturation and rolloff offsets, black lift and split toning. The post chain is a real compositor node group installed on the scene, so everything renders in F12 whether or not the viewport is showing it: grain (size scaled by gauge, chroma, shadow bias, animated), halation from luminance or from light sources, bloom, flare with an anamorphic streak, black or white mist diffusion in the 1/16 to 1 cine grades, chromatic aberration, lens distortion, vignette, gate weave, vector blur and burn in. Import a .cube LUT before or after the view transform, or bake the current look out to a cube file for your grading tool. Scopes and shots Waveform, histogram, false colour, zebra with an IRE threshold, focus peaking (optionally burned into rendered frames), a camera HUD with lens, stop, ISO, shutter and format, rule of thirds, action safe, title safe, a centre cross, and an aspect mask from 2.39 down to 1.33 or a custom ratio. The shot manager keeps a shot list with thumbnails, marker bound cameras and per shot captured settings that are re-applied when the playhead enters a shot. Export Shot Metadata writes one JSON sidecar per shot plus an EDL of the whole list, carrying name, camera, frame range, timecode in and out, fps, format and sensor size, focal length, lens profile, T-stop, ISO, shutter, focus distance, look, resolution and your note. What's in the box Halation Pro — Halation-Pro-0.1.0.zip, the Blender extension, installed through Preferences > Get Extensions > Install from Disk. Halation Lite — Halation-Lite-0.1.0.zip, the free edition, installed the same way. The user guide — USER_GUIDE.md, every tab and every control, shipped inside both zips. Five bundled presets (Pro) — anamorphic scope, bleach print, clean digital, documentary Super 16 and faded 8mm. Turkish and English interface. Requirements Blender 5.2+ — built for the new compositor. There is no back-ported 4.x branch. EEVEE and Cycles, both supported. Windows, macOS and Linux. FAQ Which Blender version do I need? Blender 5.2 or later. Halation is built against the 5.2 compositor, where the compositor lives in a node group datablock, and the socket names were verified against that build. It will not install on 4.x. Does it work in EEVEE and Cycles? Both. Depth of field, motion blur and exposure drive the real render settings, and the post chain is a compositor node group, so it renders in F12 in either engine. I turned an effect on and see nothing. Check three things in order: the viewport is in Rendered shading (Solid never composites), the Effects master checkbox on the Look tab is on, and Live Preview is on. The panel button reads Live Preview Off in red when compositing is not active in every viewport. Can I take the grade into DaVinci Resolve or Premiere? Yes. Export Look as LUT bakes the current procedural look to a .cube file at size 33, the industry default, or up to 65. You can also import a cube LUT and choose whether it applies before or after the view transform. What is the licence, and can I use it commercially? Halation is GPL-3.0-or-later, which is what a Blender Python extension must be. Whatever you render with it is yours, commercial work included. Updates and refunds Updates are free for the life of the product and arrive through your Gumroad library — you get an email each time a new build is posted. Refunds: 30 days, no questions asked. If Halation does not do what this page says, write to me and I will refund you. Install the free Lite edition first if you want to check that it runs on your machine before paying anything.