Lens flares only appear in front of objct?!?!

[starbase1]

Hi All,
A very odd errror - I am doing a fly around a spaceship with a lens flare on the main light source, (I like spaceships and lens flares!), and I am getting a very strange rendering error.

The lens falre ONLY appears on the object, not on the blank background.

The really odd bit is that it you watch it drawing the scene, it DOES draw the lens flares in correctly each pass, but they are gone in the final image?!?!

Anyone got any clues?!?!

Cheers,
Nick

[pooby]

Lens flares don't appear in the alpha channel, so, if you are compositing it, it wont work

[starbase1]

I'm not compositing, it shows correctly in the render status, but the image viewer and output file only show the flares over the spaceship, not the (blank) background!

Nick

[Adrian@Stufish]

post a grab of your lens flare settings,

but when you've hit something like this in a scene you've spent some time on, it really is worth putting it aside for a few minutes and approaching the problem in a really simple clean scene.
just make a ball roughly the size and colour of your spaceship, put one point light in the scene, use the default lens flare settings, make sure it works, tweak it untill it looks like you want, then make a copy of your orignal scene and try the flare setting in that.
Anyway, is often easiest to have a separate point light (no diff or spec) for the flare - placed 'just in front' of the 'real' light, particully if the 'rel light is some sort of 'built in' fitting.

PS lens flares DO appear in the alpha chanel, but only when you tick 'render fader alpha, and then you HAVE to use the alpha chanel !