I don’t see how adding this feature would prevent anyone from using Lens Flares without an attached light.
The way I see it is, if you have a Light component and a Lens Flare component on the same game object you can enable an option, let’s call it “Light Intensity Affects Flare Intensity”.
If it’s enabled, Light Intensity of 1 would translate to 100% Lens Flare brightness.
Light Intensity of 0.5 would translate to 50% Lens Flare brightness.
Light Intensity of 2 would translate to 200% Lens Flare brightness.
And so on.
Additional parameter, called “Light to Flare brightness ratio” would remap influence the Light Intensity has on Flare Intensity
Default Ratio of 1 would mean 1:1 (as explained above).
Ratio of 2 would mean Light Intensity of 1 translates to 200% Lens Flare brightness
Ratio of 0.5 wold mean Light Intensity of 1 translates to 50% Lens Flare brightness
There might be a better remapping method but without seeing it in action I am not sure if this wouldn’t be enough.
While a helper script can easily achieve what I requested here I still strongly advise for this feature to be implemented for two reasons:
- Artists often expect this type of workflow to be already implemented, it’s a good quality of life feature to have
- This would enable using Lens Flares on Shuriken particle Lights so that we could safely fade out flares by controlling Light intensity. (Just to clarify, as of today Lens Flares don’t work at all with Shuriken Particle System but when this will be fixed the immediate problem will be that there won’t be a way to control Flare intensity and with the API as it is today there would be no way to create additional helper script to achieve that. URP flares don't work with Shuriken Light module )