PRG Hodgie

Tom, Thank you for looking into this. I should consider adding this to the jira wishlist and see if they can make this work as intuitively as most would expect it too. If the light from an instrument creates enough light to light fog and have its presence add to ambient lighting the beam should also be able to “bounce” off a reflective surface like a mirror and have a visible beam to a terminating surface like in the real world. I too had to add an almost transparent “cone” to represent the beam bounce off to get the drawing out the door . I suppose with marionette I could have control of that fabricated beam but thats a-lot to do and in the end inaccurate. I also tried to add an emitter to the instrument at the distance from the instrument to the surface but can not change the pan and tilt on a second emitter by itself or affect the emitters output separately. Multiple emitters seem to only work in straight light strips for now. For instance in a cyberlight with a moving mirror head if you take off the covers and have the emitter that is placed at the bulb emit thru the body of the fixture and bounce off the mirror the pan and tilt would be at the mirror not at the bulb where the emitter is. In the cyberlight fixture available today in vectorworks when you pan and tilt the whole unit moves not just the mirror, editing the emitters placement fixes that but now there is no beam thru the fixture and the pan and tilt values have to be carefully calculated given the limits the mirror can move.

Dave, Thank you for the link to the video. I have watched this and a few other videos and think I applied the correct settings but the result is only half my expectation. Here is the file with a moving light emitting onto a mirror. I can see the reflection of the beam in the mirror but can not get it to show me both the reflection and what would be the beam bouncing off of the surface and continuing. I am wanting to see 3 beams in the render, the light from the instrument, the light beam reflecting in the mirror and the beam that bounces off the surface. Another question is how does focus and fall off settings react to the beam bouncing off a surface. Perhaps you could be kind enough to point out what I'm missing here it would be much appreciated. Light off mirror.vwx

How can light emitted from a lighting device bounce off a mirror texture and not go thru the mirror.