Making a LASER????

[5DNick]

Dear ODForcers,

I am (being generous maybe?) at an intermediate level in Houdini. I want to make a laser, but have no idea how to either "hack" a light, or create this asset. I could find no tutorial either.

How hard is this going to be?

Does anyone have some suggestions for me please? [not really sure where to begin]

 

Thanks

 

5D

 

 

PS: I need a kind of medium-range (I mean distance to the camera) laser, not a hero one. Ideally, it needs to mostly look like a very thin red, maybe slightly glowing, kinda cylinder. But obviously the dream is to have it act like light, and bounce as the ray trace rays would (reflect refract etc) [i have lots of these materials in a confined space]

Edited December 8, 2022 by amaviztime
more necessary info

[ryew]

Not sure whether you're looking for a long, continuous laser bouncing or somethign like laser bolts from a weapon, but I'd suggest using points to draw a line you can apply a polywire to, then carve along the line to show the laser path.

[5DNick]

I was thinking long continuous.

I was also thinking that it would (as aimed about) reflect off surfaces (multiple times) and refract AND lose energy as it went along AND/OR spread out when hitting a surface with rough reflections? Exactly like the real thing.

I was thinking creating a directional light that didn't illuminate everywhere would be a good way to go but A: don't know how to make or hack lights and B: the main thing I would want it to have is that kinda glowing all along the path that lasers have and an actual Houdini light wouldn't?

 

[animatrix]

I would probably fake it like this:

After that you can shade it however you like to make it look like laser with glow, etc. You can even create attributes on each branch to use as multiplier for the intensity, to fake the light diminishing at each hit, etc.

[5DNick]

Thanks Animatrix but I have zero budget, not even £30! Sign of the times.

[animatrix]

It's not hard to do, you have to use intersect, reflect and refract functions in VEX.

[5DNick]

Thanks for the encouragement. I may attempt with VOP nodes, I know nothing really about VEX, and i don't have a code brain

[uakin]

for perfect reflection you can write code like this and iterate

Edited December 9, 2022 by uakin

[Aizatulin]

Hi,

here is an example using the intersect and reflect (similar to uakins example) to calculate to whole ray path and carve to animate a part of it (following the trail until the end is reached).

ray_intersect_reflectA.hipnc

[5DNick]

Thanks uakin and Auzatulin, I'm going to attempt this.....