Wysiwyg Mirror

[3D-Light]

Hello

 

I have been working with wysiwyg for quiet some time and is in general happy for the program.

Never the less I have encountered a problem which I have not been able to solve asking colleagues or searching this forum.

 

I would like to create a reflective surface which reflects a beam of light.

 

When I draw a surface and changes the material setting to Mirror v.4 Perfect reflective mirror I get a surface which reflects objects and so on. The thing is that I would like to be able to shoot a beam of light into the miror and see it come out again in the right angle.

 

I've been trying with different settings in the render wizard thinking it wouldn't show up before rendering. But haven't had any luck.

 

Maybe somebody in here have been dealing with the same kind of problem and perhaps tell me what I'm doing wrong ????

 

Thank you in advance :blink:

[gareth]

I don't *think* WYG can do this. AC-ET's resident WYG guru is active on this forum, though, so hopefully he'll be able to confirm or deny this - I'd be quite happy to be proved wrong! :blink:

[DonkiDonki]

I don't *think* WYG can do this. AC-ET's resident WYG guru is active on this forum, though, so hopefully he'll be able to confirm or deny this - I'd be quite happy to be proved wrong! :blink:

 

I just had a quick go on r25, I know reflections don't work in live view but do in renders; whilst the reflective surface displays the reflection upon itself it does not re-project the beam on it's mirrored path.

 

I'm not aware of any settings to allow this effect to work, does anyone know of a way?

[gyro_gearloose]

I'm going to assume that WYG uses some form of ray-tracing algorithm to create the renders. In ray tracing, for each pixel a ray is projected into the scene. If that ray hits a surface then more rays are projected from that point to all of the light sources. If any of these rays can reach a light source without hitting another surface, then we can determine the amount of light hitting the surface and therefore the colour of the pixel.

 

If the surface is a mirror, we project just one ray from the mirror surface and then continue as before. This is why reflections of objects work in the renders, but not reflections of light beams. If you want reflections of light beams to work then we must use something called forward ray tracing. In forward ray tracing, instead of tracing the rays from camera to surface (or surfaces if we include mirrors) to light sources, we trace the rays from light sources to surfaces to camera. The disadvantage of this approach is that it is much slower than backward ray tracing.