Color coding light intensities

[hilloinen]

A great simulator!

It is a bit difficult to see what is happening after beam splitters. Maybe adding optional color coding for light intensities? For example, red being 100 % of the original intensity, blue being 10 % intensity (after a suitable beam splitter for example) etc. - or the other way around, as in optics blue photons would be more energetic...

Anyway, this way the beams could have easy to see visual appearance but the intended intensities would also be apparent with the color coding?

[ricktu288]

Then what should the color look like when the ray density is high and beams of light look continuous? Should the color reflect the power of the individual rays? I don't think so, since if you double the number of rays and half the power of each ray, the result will appear to be the same. But if one applies your color coding it will appear that the former has twice the power.

Also, how about the extremely low-intensity tail? If it is not transparent, then for a convergent series of internal reflections the scene will be filled with that color, which will even be drawn on top of the colors indicating significant rays.

Note that you can use the "Detector" tool to get numerical values for the intensities.

[ricktu288]

Implemented in Settings -> Color Mode -> Colorized Intensity. You need to enable Settings -> Float color renderer first to change the color mode.