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I made a lens in Freecad which I imported into Blender. Being new to Blender I managed to;

a) position a red bulb behind the object b) give the object a material, set transparency, raytrace and a refractive index.

At this point I could see the red light from the front but not through most of the object, while the camera at the rear. I then went about positioning the camera behind the object and inserting a plane onto which I was hoping to show the refracted light. It appears to ignore the lens.

Files and screenshot here:

https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?441655

Can anyone advise what steps are required to make it work?

Thanks!,

Andrew

user2965155
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  • amybe related: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/90698/projecting-onto-a-mirror-and-back and https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/70717/projecting-texture-onto-surface-from-point –  Dec 04 '17 at 14:49

2 Answers2

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You are using the blender internal enginge but you need a ray-tracing render engine for this to work. blender has another engine called "cycles". unfortunately cycles doesn't handle refraction all that great, but you should give it a try.

you can change the engine at the top, see attached screenshot

enter image description here

bstnhnsl
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  • I've tried this and it's worse. I can see the lamp via the center plane (no refraction) but all others don't compute. The default engine makes a better job of the appearance, though neither appear to be able to portray refracted light through an object. If this is the case, then the answer to the question is Blender can't do it? – user2965155 Dec 05 '17 at 10:48
  • I've now found LuxRender and LuxBlender. These are exactly what I'm after. – user2965155 Dec 05 '17 at 14:47
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LuxRender and the plugin LuxBlender engine have far more refractive capabilities then the built-in Blender render engines.

user2965155
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