> You can't beat the real thing though.

Agree completely. That’s one of the major issues with my space film for IMAX built off photographs. In creating shots with the sun, the photographs of the sun in high resolution don’t have any flaring due to the lenses and cameras use but we expect to see them. Since the whole film is CGI-less (from the standpoint of creating any image data beyond what is present in the photographs), the shots currently look odd without lens flares.

But added a CGI flare from one the many fine plugs available not only violates the principles of the film, but reveals how much not like the real thing they in fact are. I also recently watched “Alien” on bluray and marveled how much better and natural the real flares are vs. JJ Abrams flareporn.

I do think it would be possible to improve the current flare plugin by using physic-based naturalist modeling.

But for my project, I would love to get an ISS astronaut to mount a camera to tripod and shoot a multishot HDR composite of sun flares for my film as the plugs fail when combined with real footage, in my view.