Previously this was in the “total internal reflection” thread, but I decided to start another thread for this project.
Heres render #2 of my lamp after about 24hrs. If you’ll notice in the middle, the blue light only goes about 1/3 the way up the strands. I’ve read up on the renderer settings, but I can’t find anything about the bidirectional settings. In particular, I can’t find anything about the russian roulette setting. Does anyone know how it affects renders? I’m wondering if I need to change it in order to get the light to bounce all the way up the strands.
If anyone knows anything about how to fix this, please let me know.
You should post this over at the Indigo forums, I’m sure there’s plenty of people who could help you to get it working. Perhaps you could try it in 0.7 too.
In REAL fiber optics, you don’t see the light come inside the strands, you see it come out the end of the strands. Maybe the light you see “from the strands,” is really just the light from the actual light source, and the actuall light really is going through the strands. Maybe it looks like it should.
That is what I had in mind. I want to be able to see the light coming out of the tips. However, I can’t seem to get it to travel all the way out of the fibers. This could be because some of them cross each other. If anyone wants to play around with this, I’ve included the .blends (both are ~ 2mb’s).
1st .blend: includes the strands without the soft body modifier applied. They all point straight up, and an empty with a circular field pushes them out into the fan shape. Warning: The softbody simulation really lags the computer. While running it, it took about 10 minutes to get to frame 100. http://www.savefile.com/files/519917
2nd .blend: the softbody modifier has been applied to the strands, and they have been rearranged so that as few as possible intersect each other. This is the same file used for the render. http://www.savefile.com/files/519929
you know that you can bake the softbody into the animation and then render the frame of your choosing, I don’t know if this is a problem of yours, but I saw that it took a long time to get to frame 100 and I thought maybe it would be helpful.
Very cool render by the way, and maybe by making the distance of the light ridiculously high it could fix your problem.
