Video Copilot Optical Flares foreground layers not blocking light

[Jimmy5C17]

Hi. I'm using Video Copilots Optical Flares, but I can't get the flare to move behind an object.

Here I have a Photoshop layer cut-out. I select it as Foreground Layer 1, but as you can see, the flare does not disappear.

I've spent the entire day trying absolutely everything - the Source Type, the Source Layer, the Layer 5 Sample Method, using a black-and-white matte, but I cannot get this to work. Either the flare doesn't appear at all, or it doesn't go behind the layer.

Any help would be appreciated. This is driving me absolutely nuts.

I'm in AE 2021, and Optical Flares 1.3.5.

Thanks in advance.

[Mylenium]

Have you actually checked the fade/ obscuration options in the flare editor. Several presets have turned it off/ override it. That aside your hair looks trrerribly noisy (bad 3D render?) and could contain semi-transparent pixels that throw off the algorithms.

Mylenium

[Jimmy5C17]

I don't see any fade/obscuration options in the flare editor. Just Common Settings, Matte Box Controls, Lens Texture, Chromatic Aberration, and Color Correction.

Yes, the hair was just a mock-up preview render, but the alpha was solid. I even tried a separate black/white alpha, but that just introduced more options, which in turn meant more problems.

Most of the tutorials I found didn't really deal with obscuring, but in the few that did, they just selected the foreground in the drop-down, and it worked. Like this one here, particularly Rick Gerard's reply with the animated gif.
https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-discussions/my-optical-flares-is-blinking-and-not-worki...

[Mylenium]

You have to drill into the individual elements of the flare to gain access to the fade range and other properties. As a test you may also try a light layer and see if the effect responds to any of the parameters and triggers.

Mylenium 

[Usamisa]

The foreground layer works if it is not trimmed from the beginning. It took me a long time to figure it out.
If it is trimmed (precomp, for example), the lens flare will not disappear.

[mrwitte]

Bumping this.

I had an animation where a crane arm goes in front of a light and obscures an Optical Flare effect on an Adjustment Layer, which was initially working nicely. Later on I added some intro/outro business, adding time to the beginning/end of the comp, and couldn't figure out why I had a big flare source shooting right through the crane arm. I solo'd the crane arm matte I was using as a foreground/obscuration source, rendered the entire layer as a .mov with alpha, then used the .mov (now an untrimmed layer which was the same length as the comp) to replace the foreground layer, and everything is playing nicely again.

I probably could have just pre-comped the crane arm foreground layer and had similar results. Comps can be fiddly and weird though, so I chose the reasurringly brute-force approach right off the bat just to get it done in one attempt.

[SebABF]

I'm getting the same issue here in AE2024. I'm using Luminance as a source type...

Did you manage to find a fix for it?