When light passes through a camera lens, it undergoes a lot of internal reflection and scattering as it’s refracted along several glass components and surfaces inside the lens. So when a bright light pass through a lens, it can lead to the formation of undesirable (or desirable) lens flares.
Lens flare is what gives movies and photographs that cinematic look. They’re often rendered artificially into scenes for added dramatic effect.
Since IF has many cool camera angles, a lot of them come from really expensive pieces of glass in real life. Now that we have global coming with improved sky and atmosphere rendering, the addition of lens flares would make for some really cool screenshots, coupled with accurate satellite-imagery terrain, it would definitely simulate photos taken IRL.
Besides, we all know how much people love taking screenshots in IF. The existence of several Instagram accounts just for IF screenshots with intense competition amongst them speak for themselves.
Lens flares is realism! It’s physics of light. What’s unrealistic is when there is no lens flares when there is a bright light ex. sun or landing lights.
I’d be neat if it could be controlled in settings. For filming videos, the reflections would look cool, but I’m not sure if I’d want it every time I fly.
For first person view (Cockpit, HUD, etc.), this wouldn’t be correct, of course, but when switching to third person view, like in @Mubashir example, lens flare would be interesting.
This wouldn’t be present in HUD’s in real life nor would be visible from inside the cockpits. The best camera angle imo to benefit from this would be the ‘cinematic’ option that we currently have.
We need lens flare in game generally. All though it adds another annoying ,but yet at times very pleasant feature in-game. I allows the level of realism to really be able to spread it’s wings through the game. We need this so i suggest that everyone vote because this could change everything for IF.
