Lasers, Projectors and other light engines

[elliotwoods]

Hi all

I'm wondering if there's any ideas to add some more 'intentional' light systems to Indigo. I'd be particularly interested in some kind of shader material which could define emission of light with the following properties as a function of UV. XYZ and texture lookups:

* Intensity
* Direction (perhaps this could have a +/-)
* Colour

This would allow us to create lasers, projectors, and essentially any type of light source also.

Has there been any prior discussion regarding this?

Thanks and regards
Elliot

[OnoSendai]

Hi Elliot, in terms of intensity and colour, you can already write a shader to control those.

We will be adding support for 'laser'-like emission soon.

[elliotwoods]

yes i understand that emission maps are already possible. I've been having a lot of fun exploring these! also tried shaders, which seem to mostly be about generating 'image map'-like assets proceduraly (rather than offering any new optics capabilities).

however, being able to define direction of emitted rays (ideally with high accuracy) would significantly change things (i.e. enable lasers, projectors, etc)

is 'emitted direction' being considered as an option for future development?

thank you
Elliot

[Oscar J]

You could create your own IES maps, have you tried that?

[OnoSendai]

yes i understand that emission maps are already possible. I've been having a lot of fun exploring these! also tried shaders, which seem to mostly be about generating 'image map'-like assets proceduraly (rather than offering any new optics capabilities).

however, being able to define direction of emitted rays (ideally with high accuracy) would significantly change things (i.e. enable lasers, projectors, etc)

is 'emitted direction' being considered as an option for future development?

thank you
Elliot

Hi Elliot,
As I said we will be adding laser-like emission (e.g. emission as a delta distribution in the normal direction). We don't have plans for other directional distributions currently though. What kind of directions/distributions would you like to see?

[neo0.]

This sounds very neat But as someone who has little to no technical well.. inclination are there any plans to add things like this to the material editor for those of us who are less skilled with the technical stuff

[elliotwoods]

Hi Ono-Sendai

Thank you for your resoonse!

Yes! Projectors would be great.
I.e. ability to have a point in space which emits light in a range of directions, and a map can be applied to define the relationship between angle and intensity/colour.
Ideally we can choose what the mapping is (e.g. camera-like frustum, spherical, etc)

That said, I'd like to open the discussion concerning more 'general purpose' lighting shaders. With which we could create lasers, projectors, etc. But perhaps that's a bigger topic

So yes! Projectors would be great!

[elliotwoods]

Thank you Oscar J

Yes I have been trying IES, but for some reason I haven't got it working yet.
Also IES might not be accurate enough in itself I fear

[Zom-B]

Here is what I used once, a selfmade laser...
its not perfect but better then nothing!