For those who don’t know the tool: CinCraft LensCore is a Nuke plugin for compositing and it sits late in post inside the CinCraft lens data ecosystem.
Ray traced lens behavior, inside a comp
ZEISS calls CinCraft LensCore as a physically based way to create cinematic lens looks for visual effects and animation in a 2D comp. It builds on Virtual Lens Technology, shown at FMX 2025, and it targets the hand-built lens look stacks that often drift from shot to shot once schedules get real. Digital Production has tracked this rollout from the earlier Virtual Lens Technology push, first with Virtual Glass: ZEISS enters the simulated optics game and later with ZEISS CinCraft Virtual Lens enters beta: real glass, virtual magic, which sets LensCore up as the compositing side of that same lens data story.
LensCore centres on a GPU-accelerated, ray-traced rendering engine for Nuke that simulates lens behaviour across every pixel and every frame, apparently exceeding typical digital lens effects. The demo at the FMX booth looked great, but you’ll have to test it yourself with your own footage and renders.
One click looks, with a shelf of profiles
LensCore applies a complete lens look with one click, covering bokeh, defocus, distortion, vignetting, and other optical effects tied to a specific physical lens. A digital lens shelf lets artists load lens profiles for real cinema lenses or custom presets and quickly compare looks, aiming to enable repeatable workflows across sequences and teams.
Zeiss also lists lens characteristics it aims to capture, including sharpness, focus fall off, cat eye, chromatic aberration, distortion, and dirt filters. That part matters for day-to-day VFX work because the lens look rarely comes from a single knob, it comes from how those traits interact when you animate focus and exposure. About a third of the way into your show, the difference between a reusable lens profile and a fragile hero setup usually shows up in the vendor handoffs.
Focus changes that include breathing and cat eye
The LensCore digital lenses are provided per focal length, representing one real lens per digital lens. It also claims that the look changes with focus, including breathing and bokeh behaviour, and that cat eye bokeh applies in one step based on the selected lens. We are not well-versed enough in Zeiss Glass to verify that from a screen… Get the demo when it drops, and check for yourself.
The tool wants to work with both the company’s lenses and non-company lenses, and users can mimic practically any lens look – artists can still adjust lens characteristics such as chromatic aberrations after applying a lens , with the goal of keeping the experience technically credible and comparable to physically correct lens behaviour.
Depth helpers, inpaint, and performance notes
LensCore includes an inpaint feature that fills occluded areas behind defocused objects to reduce complex 3D setups and speed up compositing workflows. On performance, the GPU-based rendering hould mean that high-end renderings stay within time units artists already expect. There are also “fidelity options” and that can be adapted to your needs, including but not limited to serial-number-based approaches.
Where it sits in a wider lens data stack
LensCore sits next to other CinCraft components used earlier in the pipeline. CinCraft Scenario is an indoor-outdoor camera tracking solution for real-time applications, plus lens and point cloud data recording and export for post. CinCraft Mapper is a service providing frame-accurate lens distortion and shading data for post, including GUI and command line use on Linux, Windows, and macOS. The same files work with the eXtended Data (a lens-embedded technology introduced in 2017, part of the foundation for the CinCraft ecosystem).
Availability, demo, and licensing
LensCore was demonstrated at FMX 2026 in Stuttgart at booth 2.1 in the Marketplace. Worldwide availability is set for June 1, 2026 through the CinCraft webshop, with multiple licenses available. The LensCore demo version becomes available on June 1, 2026. Pricing is not yet specified; you’ll have to wait three more weeks for that. As always, test new tools before use in production, especially on shots with heavy grain, fine detail, fast motion, and tight edge work.
Digital Production will publish an interview soon – if you have any specific questions you’d want to ask (About Lenscore and Zeiss, not in General – I am NOT falling for that AGAIN), drop me a line through the contact page!
https://www.zeiss.com/photonics-and-optics/en/home/content/newsroom/news-overview/2026/cincraft-lenscore.html
https://www.zeiss.com/photonics-and-optics/us/cinematography/cincraft/virtual-lens-technology.html
