This ensures that the beams color does not darken along borders,
by using the last valid color of the ray as the border color (extending
colors in the direction of the source point).
The sunbeams node was clamping the range of influence to start at 1
pixel distance from the source. This was a poor fix for artifacts caused
by an off set in buffer coordinates. Since the u coordinate starts at
ceil(umax) the v coordinate also has to use ceil. This also fixes some
discontinuities that became visible when the source point is close to
a sharp line in the input image.
This allows adding a "fake" sun beam effect, simulating crepuscular rays
from light being scattered in a medium like the atmosphere or deep water.
Such effects can be created also by renderers using volumetric lighting,
but the compositor feature is a lot cheaper and is independent from 3D
rendering. This makes it ideally suited for motion graphics.
The implementation uses am optimized accumulation method for gathering
color values along a line segment. The inner buffer loop uses fixed
offset increments to avoid unnecessary multiplications and avoids
variables by using compile-time specialization (see inline comments
for further details).
