John Kunz

Evaluating the Laser Scan Effect in Solaris, Redshift and Karma

Added 2024-02-19 14:44:24 +0000 UTC

This is a quick look at how the laser scan effect can be implemented in Solaris and tested with both Redshift and Karma. In this video, I go through Redshift, in both the OBJ and Solaris contexts and lastly Karma XPU.

This is focused on implementing the previous laser scan effect in the different contexts and renders engines. I try to lay out some of the advantageous and disadvantageous with the current state of development of things from the perspective of a single artist working to make images that look the best in the least amount of time. Some of this advice might not hold true depending on your needs, team, render resources, project scope, licenses, and workflow.

As far as I could tell, Solaris currently doesn't support loading COP using the op: syntax so the spotlight projection textures will need to be written to disk when using Solaris.

To project a texture with a spotlight in Solaris, you'll need to apply a shader to the light.

These can be implemented with Karma light filters, assigning the gobo filter to project texture maps.

With Redshift, a USD light shader can be applied.

I tried to dial the rest of the settings on the lights, materials and camera to get the results to look the same between Redshift and Karma.

Watch the video here.

Scene files are included below.