Anyone been able to create a laser in iray?
AnotherUserName
Posts: 2,727
in The Commons
Im wondering if I can create a laser such as youd find with a laser pointer or weapon sight. Seems like it may be difficult to manage.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2026 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Something like that could be done with a cylinder primitive and shader tweeks maybe.
Yah... What im trying to emphasize is the dot thats created as opposed to the beam. Ive been able to make a flashlight but I dont know if its possible to concentrate the beam that much as to get something like im looking for.
If possible, it might be more overhead than its worth...
Maybe a really small plane primitive placed upon whatever surface you want the dot to appear, with a circular transmap and an emissive shader?
Like a prop placed on the object itself? Hmm... Thats an interesting idea. Ill try it out and see what happens.
Thanks KD and zombietafferung.
Like TheKD said, I'd make a transparent cylinder using DAZ primitive and apply a glass shader to it, color it to taste, and then remove the glossy and shiny components of the shader, then turn on emmissive at low levels.
A glass shader is something that I wouldnt have thought of. I assume the laser looks less like a solid then?
This looks promising. http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=6485
In theory, if what you want is the light at the end, a very narrow but bright spotlight should be an option.
Here. This is a 1cm x 1cm spotlight, with a 1 degree spread angle, 15000 lumens, 200% intensity, just shining on a plane primative with the default leather Iray shader.
The beam, itself, is pretty easy - though I prefer using crossed planes to a cyllinder, unless I have the "Bloom" filter enabled.
What advantage is there to using crossed planes as opposed to cylinders? How many planes would you use?
One difficulty is the disconnect that often exists between what we imagine something should look like, and what it would really look like in the real world. Often this disconnect is fostered by "Hollywood" and the tendency to create dramatic special effects without regard to actual physics. In render engines like Iray, that are supposed to emulate real world physics relative to light, that can often mean that dramatic effects that we imagine are difficult to achieve. Case in point: DaWaterRat's laser pointer. It looks like nothing more than a coloured dot on a surface that could be anything. There is nothing to suggest that it is the result of a laser pointer aimed at the surface. I believe that it has been a long time since anyone has been particularly impressed with the use of a laser pointer in the real world. In the real world it may look exactly like DaWaterRat's render when aimed at such a surface, but in the real world we would recognize it because we would probably be aware of the use of the pointer and it would be moving around on the surface as the wielder moved the pointer. In a still image we would need to show a wielder with the laser pointer, allowing the viewer to make the connection.
I havent been able to reproduce this. How far away is your light? If its not to much trouble, can you post a screen of your spotlight settings?
The light is only about 3 yards away from the plane, which may be how I got such a nice sharp image.
Settings are attached.
Excellent, thank you.
This is 15 meters back, beam exponent at 64. I probably should have increased the intensity to keep the pointer spot bright, but I wanted to play with the beam exponent setting to keep it narrow.
This, by the way, is pretty close to how our lazer pointer looks when I point it at the far wall of our kitchen to play with the cats.
And a third version, with Lumens bumped to 45000
Most laser lights you see right though them and if you've heard of these 'God Ray' light effects they sort of look like a narrow focused effect of a bunch of those gathered up into a cylinder. They are mostly transparent with a bit of opaqueness but that is due to the different enery levels of the laser light obscuring the normal view of light hidden by the laser beam.
Sure, I get that. I suppose that what im looking forward to is a good comprimise between hollywood-ish and realistic. I absolutely think that a dot cast on the wall would translate better if attached to a beam of sorts. My task then will be to take all of the contributing ideas and see if I cant come up with something that works for my render.
That looks really good. I agree that the intensity could be raised on it.
That looks really cool. Ill have to try that out just for fun!
You can see the laser beams just as you can see a movie projector's beams and headlight beams and such by the trail of light but you must be at the correct angle to see the light. The easiest way to see them from all angles is if the air is misty or dusty the light then gets reveal wear the beam is rather than looking though the beam to notice it's effects. There are also many types of laser beams.
Ahh...the infamous laser ies file! (Should have looked on the luxrender forums, instead of thinking it was somewhere on my hard drive)
One annoying thing in Iray is that spotlights don't function if you set the angle below 10.
The other problem is that SSS stops registering a light after it hits a surface.
So much for my bouncing laser light ideas.
Not sure about the bouncing, but I did get the spotlight to work at a spread angle of 1
Testing, 1.5 and below, the light is gone. Weird.
Trying to refine it a bit more...
Color White, Spread angle 1, beam component 100, emitter shape Disc, size 1x1, lumens 45000, tempurature 1250
Distance is 15 meters
Plane is 5 feet, using DS Default shader autoconverted in Iray.
To answer this question, it's a matter of polygons and emissives. A cylinder will have more surface polygons, the more polygons, the harder Iray needs to work to get the effect. Using two single-poly planes at 90º angles to each other, (scaled maybe 10% on one axis and many time 100% on the long axis,) cuts that down to just two polys. Start the "beam" at your spotlight, and end it just inside the model where the spot shows, and you should, maybe, get the best of both ideas...?
You've gotten plenty of suggestions for doing this in Iray, but it would take about 9 seconds to do it in Photoshop. Pick your poison, I guess. I'd always opt for the Photoshop route, unless it's an animation, and even then, AfterEffects is a ton better than what can be done in a "pushbutton" 3D renderer like Iray.
I was confused whether you're looking for the side-view shaft of the laser, or the end-view dot of the laser. For the end-view: The "speckle" you see in the dot is caused by local interference, in both the projection surface and on your retina. Because it's a retinal effect, how it appears is subjective; I'll see it a bit differently than you, especially if animation movement is involved. As an example, if you have normal vision,when you move your head the speckle will appear stationary. For people with near- or short-sightedness, the beam forms in front of or behind the retina, causing the speckle to move in differing directions related to the movement of the head.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_testing_using_speckle
Additionally, the gaussian profile from the typical gas laser will form a different kind of dot than a diode laser, and some diode lasers create a definite rectangle, as this is the shaped of the cleaved lasing element (the cheaper ones lack any kind of corrective optics inside, so the squarish shape is all the more obvious). If you want to make sure your viewer knows it's a laser, do three in a triangle, like the Predator. There's no guessing what it is!
As an aside, to replicate the appearance of a laser projected onto a flat surface, use any IES profile that produces the classic bell-curve. Most gas and diode lasers are single mode, meaning their profile has only one hump. In the classic helium-neon laser profile, the "bell" covers about 86% of the total irradiance, like in the picture.
For the speckle, I think I'd project onto a small geometry with the texture faked-in.
Actually, it's the old-fashioned, Poser 4 way of doing things. Four polys, crossed into an asterisk shape, then transmapped with a bright white line down the center, and a fade through to black before it reaches the end. This gives a simulated "glowing beam" akin to move 'laser beams'. Add low level emissives, and it also gives light to the surroundings like such a "laser" would.
Im curious to know whether a simulated beam such as those suggested using geometry would cast shadows in Iray?