Indigo Renderer Forum

anyone had a good idea how to make a (red) laser material?

The question is more like "are lasers possible in indigo"

and it would be more of a matter of making a red mesh emitter than a material. i guess.

It's easy... you just have to know how a laser is built

yeah but don't expect Indigo to do quantic stuff though

Have someone tried a specular with ior 1.0 emitting light (+diffraction) ?

if you use some fresnel lens you see light accumulating in given areas, I know some lasers use ruby... it's a matter to try to emulate real stuff and see if it applies, after all this is a physic light simulator

BTW I was thinking that there was some quantum bits on indigo or at least in the algorithms used by it.

how about one of you indigo gurus tries it

Fake it using a light source that has a dirac spike in its spectrum emission and put a point lightsource at the end of an almost infinite small tube using a completely absorbant material. That way only one very thin ray of light will escape. (You would't wanna try it without metropolis. Then very little light will escape)

Its sort of cheating but I bet it will work good in practice.

Slow Slow Slow...

Deus nailed it: for now (Ono may eventually integrate, perhaps with full IES profiles, a way to do this otherwise) stick an emitter at the end of a long tube.

You're not actually going to collimate the laser light by designing a laser setup, that portion of the physics of light isn't simulated.

Quantum physics, as I specified
Ah, specular can't emit light ?

Medium/null needs volumetric emission

Another way to do it would be to put a very tiny, very bright hemisphere-shaped emitter at the focus of a parabolic mirror. The beam that comes off the mirror will have all of its rays parallel. You'll either have to put in an object for the beam to strike, or you'll need to use atmospherics if you want the beam to be visible.

In real life, this parabolic mirror setup would give you a straight beam, but the beam wouldn't be coherent. Indigo doesn't simulate the aspects of the beam that would differentiate it from a real laser, though. You won't get the same diffraction effects you would with a real laser, unfortunately.

By the way -- if you try this, be sure to post it, eh? I'm curious to see how well it works .

Parabolic mirror set-up

Site regarding mathematical functions
How to get focus out of a parable

Well, it works more or less... I added a cylinder with ss on the right light on the left it's au naturel Still you will find that the light is parallel although not like in a laser perhaps... most, not to say all, of the light in the floor is indirect lighting from the ball.

Nice, how do you do the parable?
I tried it with an special IES and an squashed halfsphere as mirror, but I can't get it parallel, its always diverging a bit.
The IES is a light which sends out max between zero and one degrees and null above that.

thats a really nice test gotta try that myself!