"Masaki " <mas### [at] akanewasedajp> wrote:

> (2) In pov-ray, is it possible for the camera to visualize the direct light from
> the source?
> I want to acquire the conical surface light through the prism object directly.

By "acquire", do you mean visualize?

One thing to remember about POV-Ray, is that it's only a mathematical construct
- a simulation a light and its interaction with objects.  It can do that REALLY
well, so it's easy to forget, but none of it really "exists" until it gets
rendered as a pixel of a specific color and brightness.

Light, in POV-Ray is much like real light, in that you can't really see it
unless it interacts with something else.  You can't see the wind itself, but you
can see its effect on things it interacts with.

You could add a cloud of media for the light to light up.

Other than that, I'd say that depending upon what you want to see as the end
result, then you might try modeling a sort of container for the light cone.

Sometimes when I'm writing a scene, I make a fake model of the light source, and
draw a cylinder from that to my look_at point, and draw a transparent cone if
it's a spotlight.

Similarly, two extremely thin nested cones with transparency might give you a
usable effect.
You might consider defining a CSG container that demarcates the boundaries of
your light, and fill it randomly with VERY small spheres (or blobs) - so thin
that they may or may not be a pixel wide, or draw VERY thin cylinders so that
you get the same random visibility along their length.

Just some ideas.

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