Visible Light Beams

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on March 5, 2012 at 9:54am

There are three ways to do this.

1. Draw the spot light with a visible beam in SketchUp, and change the layer of the light beam itself.

The Beams are in the Layer RPS_Lamp_Beams - which we do not render. If you change the layer to anything else, they will render. Here is a rendering with the lamp beam rendered as well.

2. The beam does not gow much - because in this case the beam angle and field angle were 20 degrees, and the light is pretty much parallel to the beam. So I right clicked on the beam, chose Edit Material,  and gave it a self glow and a rubble texture (You can just barely see the texture in this rendering)

3. On the Light Wizard there is a separate tab for light beams.

This creates several beams inside the main beam, and gives them a texture. This creates more of a foggy effect:

4. And for a really foggy beam, you can use Volumetric Fog:

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on March 5, 2012 at 9:56am

As extention to my previous message.

I have to define light source as very short light flash, timing ~1ns [nanoseconds], specifing time of start and stop flash light and time of start-stop of shutter (light detector or camera).

Is the description clear enough ?

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on March 5, 2012 at 9:58am

Are you hoping to create an animation with a flashing light beam?

If so, you can create a very short frame with the light in a layer which is turned on, and then a longer frame with the light layer off.

However, unless each frame is about 1/24th of a second, you won't actually see the light.

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