Cart

Docs · Glow & rays

Ray Burst

Volumetric light rays from a point: radial god-rays that stream from highlights away from the source point, with optional Atmospheric Extinction that filters the rays through colored air — distant rays dim and shift tone, which sells scale in a way plain rays don't.

Product page →
Version 0.4.0
Parameters 15
GPU On the GPU (Metal), with a CPU fallback. Nothing to configure.
Hosts After Effects 2020 or later (2025 or later recommended). macOS 11 or later, Apple Silicon and Intel.

Ray Burst throws volumetric light rays out of a single point. Bright areas of the frame become the seeds, and the rays stream away from a Source Point you place in the comp — sun through a window, a projector beam in a dusty room, a backlit logo, headlights in fog. It’s the effect for light that has to travel through something rather than sit on the plate.

The effect works from one reading of the frame rather than from the frame itself. Base On selects that reading, and Threshold sets how bright a pixel has to be before it seeds anything; whatever clears the gate throws light directly away from Source Point, which is why nothing ever points back toward it. Color arrives separately: the rays wear a three-stop ramp read off their own energy — Highlights where the fan burns hottest, Midtones through the body, Shadows where it has decayed to almost nothing — with Boost Light behind it. That separation is the whole reason the light stays art-directable instead of reading as a smeared copy of the plate.

Extinction is the part with no equivalent in a plain radial smear. It filters the finished rays through colored air, so distant rays don’t merely fade — they dim and shift tone the way real air does over distance, and Extinction Bias sets which way that shift runs. The difference between the near end and the far end of a single shaft is what sells scale: a long ray reads as depth instead of as a gradient. And since everything hangs off Source Point, animating it is the classic reveal — walk it behind a logo or a figure and the whole fan swings with it.

Parameters

Controls

13 params

Source Point is the origin the whole effect is built around: rays leave it and never come back, so moving it re-aims every shaft in the frame at once. It starts at the center of the layer, and animating it is the move this effect was built for.

Ray Length is reach. Ray Length 30–80 hugs the sources for a compact flare; Ray Length 150–300 gives full-frame shafts at 1080p. It’s a plain distance, not a percentage of the frame, so larger comps want larger numbers — ride Master Scale rather than re-dialing. Boost Light is the brightness of the ray pass and it ships at 0: walk it up until the shafts carry, then stop. Boost Light 2–20 covers most plate work; the rest of the slider is for heavily gated or genuinely dim sources.

Threshold decides what seeds a ray. At the default of 0 every non-black pixel contributes — right for a graphic on black, almost never right on a plate, where you raise it until only the true highlights survive. There’s no rolloff dial behind the gate, so leave headroom below your intended sources rather than parking on them. Base On selects which reading of the image the effect works from: Lightness is the default, Luminance weights the channels the way the eye does, and Red, Green or Blue read one channel — the way to promote a single colored element above everything else in the frame. The gate compares that reading, not the picture: with Base On on Red, a pixel passes Threshold on its red value alone, however dark it looks overall.

The three colors are one ramp read off the rays’ own energy, not three separate tints: the hottest parts of the fan take Highlights, the body runs through Midtones, and whatever has decayed furthest — usually the far tails — lands on Shadows. Midtones is usually the stop to move when a look isn’t reading, and Boost Light brightens the rays without re-indexing the ramp, so cranking it never pushes more of the fan into the Highlights color. The factory ramp is an ember (white, amber, deep red), which is why an untouched Ray Burst comes out warm rather than neutral; set all three white and the rays carry no color of their own.

Extinction filters the finished rays through colored air: they dim and shift tone with distance from Source Point, which an opacity falloff can never fake. Extinction 30–80 is atmosphere on a full-frame shaft. Dial the ramp first, add air second. Extinction Bias sets which direction that tone shift runs and ships at Extinction Bias = 40; judge it on the far end of your longest shaft and take the sign that sends the tail where the shot needs it.

Shine Only drops the source image and outputs the ray pass by itself — duplicate the layer, turn it on for the copy, and the rays become their own element to blur, grade, offset in time, or hold behind foreground pieces. Quality trades render time against ray fidelity: Q3 is the default, Q4 for finals, Q1 or Q2 while you block the move.

Name Type Range Default Choices
License button — — —
Source Point point — (50, 50) —
Ray Length slider 0–500 (hard 0–1000) 100 —
Boost Light slider 0–100 (hard 0–200) 0 —
Threshold slider 0–255 0 —
Base On popup — Lightness Lightness · Luminance · Red · Green · Blue
Shadows color — RGB 198, 28, 8 —
Midtones color — RGB 250, 162, 24 —
Highlights color — RGB 255, 255, 255 —
Shine Only checkbox — off —
Quality popup — Q3 Q1 · Q2 · Q3 · Q4
Extinction slider 0–200 (hard 0–400) 0 —
Extinction Bias slider -100–100 40 —

Master

2 params

Two dials sit on top of everything else: Master Amount multiplies Boost Light, Master Scale multiplies Ray Length, and both read 100 for neutral. Neither one adds a look of its own — they ride the one you already built, which is what makes them the dials to keyframe. Bring Master Amount up and the shafts arrive without the ramp or the gate moving under them; ramp Master Scale and the reach extends while the brightness holds. Animate the Master dial or the dial beneath it, never both — the multiply lands twice.

Master Scale doubles as the resolution dial. Ray Length is a plain distance, so a look built at 1080p covers less ground in a larger comp; scale it here and every shaft grows together instead of re-dialing the reach by hand. It’s also the cleanest way in from nothing: at Master Scale = 0 the folded Ray Length leaves no reach to draw, so the shafts open out of the source as you bring the dial up.

Name Type Range Default Choices
Master Amount slider 0–200 (hard 0–400) 100% —
Master Scale slider 0–200 (hard 0–400) 100% —

Examples

Sun shafts through a window

Hard daylight streaming into an interior, changing tone as it crosses the room

  1. Apply Ray Burst to the interior plate and drag Source Point onto the hottest part of the window — the blown pane itself, not the frame around it.
  2. Gate to the window alone: set Base On to Luminance, then raise Threshold = 190 until the lit walls and faces stop seeding rays. There’s no rolloff behind the gate, so overshoot slightly rather than sitting on the edge; a threshold parked at the source’s own brightness will pop the first time the exposure moves.
  3. Reach across the room with Ray Length = 260 at 1080p, then bring Boost Light = 6 up from rest until the shafts read against the walls.
  4. Warm the ramp for daylight: leave Highlights white, take Midtones to a pale straw, and pull Shadows off the factory deep red toward a dark neutral brown so the far tail dies into the room instead of turning red.
  5. Put air in it: Extinction = 55, then judge the shipped Extinction Bias = 40 on the far end of the longest shaft before you touch it. Near and far should part company in tone so the shaft reads as crossing the room rather than lying flat on it — push the number further if they don’t, and flip the sign if the tail goes the wrong way for the grade.

Variations: raise Extinction to 90 for a smaller, hazier room; or take Extinction Bias = -30 for the opposite tone route, which is usually the dust-and-particulate read rather than the clear-air one.

Backlit logo reveal

A logo that fans rays as a light source sweeps behind it, then settles

  1. Put the logo on black (or on its own layer with alpha) and apply Ray Burst. Set Base On to Lightness and Threshold = 40 — on a graphic the artwork is the only bright thing in frame, so the gate only has to clear the anti-aliased edges.
  2. Shape the light: Ray Length = 180, Boost Light = 8. Graphics take more push than footage does; there’s no plate detail behind them to blow out.
  3. Sweep the source: keyframe Source Point from left of the logo to right of it over about two seconds, roughly level with the middle of the artwork. Rays only travel outward, so the fan flips direction as the point crosses each letter, and that flip is the reveal.
  4. Grow the rays from nothing: keyframe Master Scale = 0 on the first frame up to Master Scale = 100 a third of the way in. Scale folds Ray Length, so at zero there is no reach to draw and the shafts open out of the mark itself.
  5. Settle the ending: ease Master Scale down to 30 over the last half second. That folds Ray Length = 180 to about 54, so the shafts pull back to a short residual flare around the mark instead of full-length rays.
  6. Drop Quality to Q1 while you block the sweep, then put it back to Q3 — or Q4 — before you judge the final look or render it.

Variations: keyframe Extinction = 0 upward across the sweep so the rays gain air as they extend; or set Base On to Red on a two-color mark so only the accent throws light.

Red neon rays in a wet street

A red neon sign in a wet street that throws rays while the cool signage around it stays put

  1. Apply Ray Burst to the plate and set Base On to Red. The effect now works from the red channel alone, so the sign measures at full strength while the cyan and green signage around it drops out of contention.
  2. Finish the isolation with the gate: Threshold = 205, high enough that only the tube cores and the hottest speculars survive. On a single channel the cool storefronts stay dark even where they’re objectively brighter than the sign; only broadly white sources still compete, and the gate handles those.
  3. Place Source Point on the sign itself and keep the reach local: Ray Length = 120 — a sign lights its own doorway, not the whole street — with Boost Light = 5.
  4. Recolor for neon instead of fire: Highlights a hot pink-white, Midtones the sign’s own red, Shadows a deep magenta, so the tails stay in the sign’s family rather than drifting orange the way the factory ramp does.
  5. Wet-air falloff: Extinction = 70, then set Extinction Bias = -50 and look at the tail. You want the shift that keeps the far reaches inside the sign’s own color rather than pulling them out of it; if -50 does the opposite on this plate, take the same number positive.

Variations: stack a second instance with Base On set to Green and its own Source Point on the green signage for an independent second ray color; or hold Extinction Bias at the setting that cools the tails, so the sign reads as sitting further back in the street.