OTOY Forums

Hi, I'd like to simulate a projector in Octane. My first thought was an emitter plane covered with a film plane which has the projected image as a transparency map. But of course, this just results in a blurry mess being projected. (pic above is 3 planes - emitter at bottom facing up, film, and screen at top)

Perhaps I could create a VERY long tube to make a VERY narrow spotlight...then put the film at the opening to the tube.

Any ideas? Anyone ever done this with an unbiased renderer?

I've done it, making gobos for an interior light project. The narrow spotlight approach worked for me, but i'm sad to say that I could only get it to work in maxwell - in Octane i had to crank up the exposure so high that colours started acting weird.

/rune

Well, here's the best I could do...here's 64k samples attempting to project this image: oh well, maybe someday I'll give it a shot again.

Mmm... yes, I've done it with Twilight's unbiased engine. I believe Thea Render can do it, too.

I'm new to Octane -just bought a license- and I'm wondering why it should be so difficult to do. I guess the current version of Octane doesn't have spotlights, which in other software can load an image to project.

Yes and one of the Octane developers implied once that spotlights will never be implemented because they look unnatural and would slow down rendering.