Visualize ray tracing

Support Lighting and Rendering
#1

Hi,

I want to visualize ray paths in Blender in a similar way to what this ray tracing web application achieves:

Capture d’écran 2018-03-26 à 21.43.54.png743×702 153 KB

In a blender conference talk, Paul Melis showed a solution to this (which is exactly what I need): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwu1t4tzeiI&index=17&list=PLa1F2ddGya_8FBk61qbCdRu-otyPzFfDF
But I can’t find any available script or add-on that actually achieves this result.

Does anyone know how I can visualize ray tracing in blender?

Is there a cheap way to visualize light paths?
#2

You cannot access to that information from addons or scripts… you need to hook a watch code inside the render routines, and recompile Blender (which was what Paul Melis did). Just remeber that the amount of rays being throwned by Cycles is enormous!

#3

how would one hook a watch code to the render routines? I too am trying to make a visualization like what Zazizizou was asking for

#4

what is this web app btw?

EDIT: https://ricktu288.github.io/ray-optics/
I believe this is it