Add screen space lens flares

The Screen Space Lens Flare override adds lens flares to your scene.

To calculate lens flares, the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) fetches bright areas of the current image, such as emissive lights and bright specular reflections. URP then draws the same areas back to the screen in different locations and using different effects such as stretch, blur, and chromatic aberration.

The Screen Space Lens Flare creates lens flares from the following:

  • Emissive surfaces.
  • Bright spots in your scene that appear depending on the camera view, for example a bright specular reflection on a shiny metal object, or a bright outside area viewed from a dark indoor area.
  • All onscreen lights.

You can use the Lens Flare (SRP) component instead to create a flare for a light that has a specific position in the scene. You can also use both the Lens Flare (SRP) component and the Screen Space Lens Flare override in the same scene.

How screen space lens flares work

The bright areas URP uses to calculate screen space lens flares are the same areas the Bloom override brightens.

URP uses the same buffer as the Bloom override to fetch the bright areas and render the lens flares. The settings in the Bloom override affect the appearance of screen space lens flares.

You can create the following types of lens flare:

  • Regular flares, which are a brightened distorted version of the bright areas of the screen.
  • Reversed flares, which are regular flares flipped upside-down and reversed.
  • Warped flares, which are regular flares transformed using polar coordinates, to mimic a circular camera lens.
  • Streaks, which are flares stretched in one direction, to mimic an anamorphic camera lens.

You can control which types of flares appear and how many there are. You can also control the chromatic aberration effect URP adds to the flares.


The left image shows an emissive cube with bloom but no lens flares. The right image shows the same cube and a regular flare (top-left), a reversed flare (bottom-right), a warped flare (top-right) and streaks (to the left and right of the cube).

Enable screen space lens flares

Screen Space Lens Flare uses the Volume system, so to enable and modify Screen Space Lens Flare properties, you must add a Screen Space Lens Flare override to a Volume in your scene.

Use screen space lens flares

To add Screen Space Lens Flare to a Volume:

  1. In the Scene or Hierarchy view, select a GameObject that contains a Volume component to view it in the Inspector.
  2. In the Inspector, select Add Override > Post-processing > Screen Space Lens Flare.
  3. Set Intensity to a value higher than 0.
  4. If you have a Bloom override in the volume, set Intensity in the Bloom override to a value higher than 0 or lens flares won't appear.

Some lens flares only appear, or only appear at full intensity, if you enable High Dynamic Range (HDR) rendering on your camera. To enable HDR, refer to the Output section of the Camera component reference.