Rendering

Beam#

BlenderDMX is generating two styles of light output. The lense is rendered as an emitter material and the beam is rendered as a spot light.

The default 3D view viewport shading in Blender is Solid, you cannot see neither the emmiter nor the beam:

In order to see the lense (emitter), you need to enable Material Preview:

You can also see a “fake” beam cone by enabling the “Volume preview”, but that is not a real beam. This allows to be set on None, only Selected fixture or on All fixtures.

To see the full volumetric beam, you need to use Rendered output and also enable the Volume box:

Volumetric Beams#

To enable the Volumetric beams:

• Click Update Volume Box
• Check Disable Overlays
• Check Enable Volume Scatter
• Set Density to for example 0.1

Eevee#

Tweak Volumetrics in Eevee#

This is in right side panel, under Render - Volumes:

• Set start/end to smaller values. This depends on camera, so you need to experiment.
• Resolution
• Steps
• Distribution

Cycles#

In Cycles, beam is rendered as starting from the beam lens, with the width of the lens diameter. This can make gobo projection slightly blurry. See details here.

Lasers#

Implementation of lasers in BlenderDMX does not use Blender lights for the laser rays but rather emitter material on a long, thin cylinder, projected from the laser’s geometry onto objects which are in a Laser collision collection that must be created and then selected by the user. See Laser article for more details.