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Why doesn't this work? Laser beams of light hitting a mirror, not bouncing of to the ground plane

I know that Cycles isn't a physically accurate rendering engine, but this seems like the lasers beams should bounce off shoudn't they?

Here's the file to test: https://pasteall.org/blend/3b55765cbbff42f2a11a716066f931b1

Chris
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Gyoo
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  • I think I'd need to see the blend file to guess at the problem, but it's usually tricky to get cycles to display light paths. (How to add a blend file) – Marty Fouts Oct 20 '21 at 23:34
  • https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/90698/projecting-onto-a-mirror-and-back https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/39663/laser-beam-pathway-with-reflective-mirrors/39706#39706 https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/89877/how-does-blender-lights-work-in-cycles-regarding-intensity https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/150277/how-to-visualize-reflection-of-a-beam-or-ray – Duarte Farrajota Ramos Oct 21 '21 at 09:45

1 Answers1

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In theory, you should get the desired effect by activating "caustics" in your render settings.

In practice, Cycles doesn't handle caustics very well, so it still doesn't give the desired effect.

If you want light beams to bounce or refract realistically, you should use LuxCore renderer instead.

For more details, you could look into this thread on blenderartists: https://blenderartists.org/t/reflective-caustics-in-cycles/1238365/7

haarigertroll
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  • Even enablinng caustics don't change a thing... Do you know if it's going to be fixed/improved in CyclesX? – Gyoo Oct 21 '21 at 10:58
  • I don't know about CyclesX, but my guess would be that there wouldn't be much difference in this respect. As stated above, you should probably check out LuxCore (https://luxcorerender.org/download/). It's free and has a good blender integration – haarigertroll Oct 21 '21 at 11:15
  • @haarigertoll, thanks, it work great. – Gyoo Oct 21 '21 at 22:00