Higx Optics ray-traces the glass instead of faking the bokeh

For those who don’t know the tool: Higx Optics is a bokeh and depth-of-field plug-in for compositing. Developer Mads Hagbarth Damsbo’s tool runs in Nuke, After Effects and DaVinci Resolve Studio and is intended for creating or refining lens defocus and optical character during postproduction.

There are many ways to make something blurry. Higx has chosen one of the more elaborate ones: reconstruct a lens, send virtual light through it and let the simulated optics decide what happens. Higx Optics is a bokeh and depth-of-field plug-in from developer Mads Hagbarth Damsbo. The first release supports Foundry Nuke, Adobe After Effects and DaVinci Resolve Studio, with one licence covering all three hosts. Damsbo says the software grew out of roughly three years of work on ray-traced bokeh and describes this release as the beginning rather than the finished version of the original idea. DP has not tested Optics. The feature descriptions below are based on Higx’s published material; our assessment follows separately.

What Higx reports

The core idea is considerably more interesting than applying another 2D defocus kernel. Higx says Optics reconstructs multi-element lenses from published optical prescriptions and traces light through those virtual elements. The resulting bokeh should therefore be determined by the lens construction instead of starting with a predefined blur shape.

The practical consequence, according to Higx, is that effects normally associated with real optics can result from the simulated lens rather than being applied independently afterwards. The product material demonstrates off-axis bokeh deformation, cat-eye shapes, coma, astigmatism, field curvature and chromatic aberration. Optics also exposes those imperfections creatively instead of treating them solely as defects to be eliminated. Lens Coverage changes how much peripheral lens behaviour enters the image, while additional controls manipulate effects such as coma and astigmatism.

There are also more deliberately artistic controls. Higx presents Impression as a way of modifying the character of bokeh edges, while a control called “The Deakinizer” is intended to produce smeared peripheral behaviour inspired by modified optics used by Roger Deakins. Higx’s material additionally shows custom iris shapes, front-filter effects, dirt and scratches, water-droplet effects and a Shimmer system for animated highlights. Foreground occlusion is intended to keep defocused objects from simply painting bokeh over everything behind them, while overlapping highlights can accumulate rather than behaving as independent transparent discs.

The current release uses the same rendering engine in Nuke, After Effects and Resolve Studio. Nuke support is listed from version 15.0 through 17.1, with Nuke Indie excluded. Performance is the one area where Higx makes a particularly concrete claim. The company demonstrates Optics running a 4K Resolve composition at 24 fps on an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 in preview quality. Treat that as a vendor demonstration, not as a benchmark for your workstation.

Pricing

• Indie: $149 per year
• Single: $249 per year
• Site: $1,490 per year

One Optics licence covers Nuke, After Effects and DaVinci Resolve Studio rather than requiring separate purchases for each host. The licensing model behaves more like annual maintenance than pure rental. Higx states that builds released while the membership is active continue to work after membership ends. Renewing later restores access to subsequent updates.

The obvious comparison: ZEISS LensCore

Optics arrives in a market that suddenly has another serious attempt at solving essentially the same difficult problem. ZEISS CinCraft LensCore is also built around a GPU-accelerated ray-traced lens engine rather than a conventional defocus filter. ZEISS says LensCore simulates bokeh, focus falloff, distortion, shading and vignetting, chromatic aberration, breathing and other lens characteristics from physically based lens models. It is currently a Nuke plug-in.

The similarity is fundamental. Both products try to move lens effects away from a stack of unrelated 2D approximations and towards one optical model from which several characteristics emerge together. In both cases, ray tracing is being used as part of a compositing workflow rather than to render the entire scene. The important difference is where those models come from.

Higx says Optics reconstructs lenses from published optical prescriptions. ZEISS is a lens manufacturer and builds LensCore around its own digital lens technology and cinema-lens data. The current LensCore package includes digital profiles for ZEISS Aatma lenses at 35, 50 and 85 mm and Supreme Primes ranging from 15 to 200 mm. ZEISS also allows users to construct and modify custom digital lenses.

LensCore is driven by familiar physical parameters such as focal length, focus distance and T-stop. ZEISS says a profile represents an individual focal length rather than applying one generic look to an entire lens family. Its Nuke workflow supports RGB plus depth information and Deep imagery, and ZEISS includes an inpaint system for reconstructing areas revealed when foreground objects are defocused.

Optics currently has the broader host footprint. Higx supports Nuke, After Effects and Resolve Studio now, while LensCore remains Nuke-only. ZEISS has said that additional host support is planned.

Their commercial models differ as well. LensCore currently starts at €34 per month for a node-locked licence and €39 for floating, with render-only licensing from €10. ZEISS says monthly LensCore subscriptions will remain available only through the end of 2026, after which LensCore moves to annual subscriptions.

DP analysis

The interesting thingy of Optics is not that it can make attractive bokeh. Plenty of tools can do that. The claim is that several optical effects are consequences of the same virtual lens. If that holds together under difficult material, focus pulls and large depth-of-field transitions, the result should be more internally consistent than constructing a lens look from separate defocus, distortion, vignette, chromatic-aberration and bokeh treatments.

That is also why the LensCore comparison matters. ZEISS has the obvious advantage when the requirement is a known cinema lens whose behaviour should correspond to manufacturer data. LensCore is explicitly built around that idea and provides named digital versions of current ZEISS lenses.

Higx appears to approach the same problem more like an optical laboratory. Published lens prescriptions, unusual historical designs and controls for deliberately damaging the theoretical optics make it potentially attractive when the desired result is not necessarily “give me this particular production lens,” but “give me an interesting lens and then misbehave with it.”

There is another practical difference: an After Effects or Resolve artist can use Optics today. LensCore currently requires Nuke. What we cannot say yet is which renderer produces the more convincing result.

The useful test is straightforward: use the Optics trial on your own renders and plates, push the depth transitions, rack focus, inspect occlusion boundaries and highlight behaviour, then compare it against the defocus tool you already use and, if available, LensCore. If the differences survive that exercise, Optics becomes much more interesting. Until then, it is a technically intriguing first release with a rather good collection of virtual glass and simulated optical sins.

https://higx.net/optics/