ZEISS CinCraft LensCore: Cinema Lens Looks for Compositing

ZEISS CinCraft LensCore: Cinema Lens Looks for Compositing

Brie Clayton May 6, 2026

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ZEISS announces the launch of CinCraft LensCore, a novel solution for creating physically based cinematic lens looks for visual effects and animation. Built on the Virtual Lens Technology introduced at FMX in 2025, this new Nuke plugin brings decades of ZEISS optical expertise into post-production, bridging the gap between on-set lens choices and the VFX pipeline.

With CinCraft LensCore, ZEISS offers compositing artists a toolset dedicated to achieving cinema-grade lens looks grounded in the characteristics and physics of real lenses. At its core is a unique GPU-accelerated, ray-traced rendering engine for The Foundry Nuke that simulates authentic lens behavior across every pixel and every frame, while far exceeding the capabilities of available digital lens effects.

With CinCraft LensCore, ZEISS brings the effects of real-world optics to a 2D compositing environment, explains Egor Nikitin, Head of Digital Cinematography at ZEISS. LensCore speaks the same language as the lenses on set, from the way light falls off at the edges of the frame to the nuance of out-of-focus highlights. That fidelity is made possible by ZEISS' history and deep understanding of optical science.

LensCore Lens Selection

CinCraft LensCore combines accuracy with efficiency. With one click, a complete digital lens look can be applied to a shot, with realistic bokeh, defocus, distortion, vignetting, and other optical effects characteristic of a specific physical lens. Through the digital lens shelf, artists can instantly load lens profiles of a real cinema lens or of one their own custom presets and compare looks in seconds. This fluidly replaces time-consuming manual setups with repeatable, production-ready workflows to easily maintain consistency across sequences and teams.

Beyond replicating existing optics, LensCore also enables artists to generate entirely new, never-before-seen lenses that still behave with the physics of authentic glass. Artists can start from physically accurate ZEISS or custom lens profiles and manually adjust every key lens characteristic, pushing the look as far as the project vision requires, while remaining grounded in believable optical performance.

Every feature is driven by real optical parameters: focus, T-stop, focal length, and focus distance, keeping lens behavior physically coherent across the full range of adjustments. A built-in inpaint feature intelligently fills occluded areas behind defocused objects, reducing the need for complex 3D setups and speeding up compositing workflows.

LensCore Lens Customization

As a former VFX supervisor, I know firsthand how much time gets spent trying to match a specific lens look in post, even when it was properly documented during the shoot, adds Joern Grosshans, Product Manager Digital Cinematography at ZEISS. LensCore addresses that need at the source. This advance offers artists a virtual shelf of lenses with accurate, predictable behavior, accessible the same way a DoP pulls a lens from a rental house-to be implemented with just a click. That kind of workflow clarity is a gamechanger.

CinCraft LensCore is being demonstrated at FMX 2026 in Stuttgart, Germany, by Joern Grosshans, Florian Hofmann, and Egor Nikitin from ZEISS on Tuesday, May 5, at 11:15 AM. Attendees can also experience a full demo at the ZEISS booth 2.1 in the FMX Marketplace.

ZEISS CinCraft LensCore will be available worldwide through the CinCraft webshop beginning June 1, 2026, with multiple licenses available.

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