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Light off a Mirror


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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Hello @PRG Hodgie:

In Renderworks render modes you can set a spot light to generate caustics (in the Obj Info palette for the spot light), and turn on caustics in the render style resource's Options pane.  The most efficient way to get caustics is to use a light that is only generating caustics, this setting is in the Obj Info palette.

 

 

 

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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

Edited by PRG Hodgie
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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

hmmm, So I was able to get this to work with the light object tool, have a look at the settings in this file, the only things I changed were the renderworks style and the edit light info of the lighting device.

 

I removed realistic fall off, I would reccomend smooth, just remember this impacts output in a big way.

 

I also unchecked caustic photons only and set caustics to low.

 

As you can see it does not work from the Spotlight lighting device, we will need to investigate this further.

 

I believe lit fog only emits from the light object so I am not sure if it would be visible in the reflected light. I achieved something similar to this recently  by creating an extrude with a cloud like transparent texture. The light beam illuminated the texture alot like haze in the real world.

 

 

Light off mirror error.vwx

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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.

 

 

 

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  • 1 year later...
On 4/6/2021 at 2:45 PM, TomWhiteLight said:

I achieved something similar to this recently  by creating an extrude with a cloud like transparent texture

Hi Tom,

 

Any chance you could share this texture?  I'm playing the same game looking at bouncing light off multiple mirrors.  Because I want to see lit fog for the reflected light, I think the only way currently is to cheat it.  Your fuzzy glowing cloud sounds like it's worth a try!

 

Cheers,

 

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