Manual · every panel, every preset

Laser Projector
for Blender

Turn any Area or Spot light into an animated laser projector. Pick a preset, tweak a few plain-English settings, and the pattern lands on whatever the light hits — heads, products, walls, fog. It all lives on the light’s own shader tree: no gobo mesh, no extra geometry, and nothing standing in the beam casting a shadow.

34 presets Cycles for patterns Beams also in Eevee Free · $19 · $34.99

Grid · Spot · red diode Every still and clip here is a render made with the add-on

01Install & first light
02The panel, top to bottom
03The preset library
04Layer, bend, draw, play
05Volumetric beams
06Laser-thin, and clean
07The camera look
08Editions
09Under the hood

01 · Getting started

Install & first light

Patterns are drawn by a light node tree, which is a Cycles-only feature in Blender. The panel spots another engine and offers a one-click switch.

The Laser sidebar tab in an empty scene: New Projector with Spot and Area buttons, and the note Select a projector to edit it — Sidebar · Laser tabEmpty state

Install

Take the release zip, or zip the laser_projector folder yourself.
Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Add-ons ▸ Install from Disk.
Enable Laser Projector, then press N in the viewport — the Laser tab is there.

Sixty seconds to a beam

Put the 3D cursor where the light should land.
Click Spot (recommended) or Area under New Projector. It is placed above and in front, already aimed.
Switch the viewport to Rendered.
Open Pattern, click through the thumbnails, hit Play Animation.
Need something to hit? Scene Helpers ▸ Add Demo Target, then Add Atmosphere for haze.

02 · Reference

The panel, top to bottom

One sidebar tab. Panels above your edition are not there at all — lower tiers ship with those modules deleted, not greyed out.

The preset picker in gallery mode: all thirty-four patterns as labelled thumbnails in a grid — Pattern · gallery mode34 presets

Reading the list

The panels below are in the order the sidebar draws them, so reading down this page and scrolling down the sidebar are the same motion. The badge on each is the lowest edition that ships it.

The thumbnails are renders

The picker draws its own, so a preset you edit and re-render looks like itself in the list. Re-render Thumbnails in Scene Helpers rebuilds the set; the gallery toggle switches between this wall and a compact row.

PatternFree: Category filter, thumbnail picker, gallery toggle, a description of how the preset moves, and Play Animation. Sweeping presets show motion echoes in the still.
Pattern SettingsFree: The current preset’s own knobs, read straight from its node group — Cells, Line Width, Speed, Trail, Softness. The reset arrow restores defaults; Laser Thin drops every width control to a hairline.
Second PatternLite: Layer any second preset over the first — Screen, Mask, Intersect, Add or Subtract, with an Amount fade. Both layers keep their own settings.
Galvo TracePro: Hides the pattern, then draws it along a scan path behind a bright head with a decaying trail. Raster, Radial, Spiral or Linear; scan rate, head, trail, persistence.
EffectsLite: Shape bends the coordinates before the pattern is drawn: Mirror, Kaleidoscope, Pixelate, Distort. Level reworks the result: Invert, Outline, Gain, Pulse, Edge Fade.
AudioPro: Bake a track’s loudness — band-limited, with attack and release — and route it to Light Power, Global Speed, or any pattern, effect or colour knob, between a Quiet and a Loud value.
BeamFree: Colour by wavelength, Power, Rainbow hue sweep, Per Element hue — every cell, bar or beam its own colour on the presets that have discrete elements — aperture or cone size, Blur, Global Speed and Time Offset.
Volumetric BeamsFree: Mesh beams in air without fog. Free has the full panel and the Beam Fan preset; the other three beams presets are Lite. See 05.
PlacementFree: Offset, rotate and repeat the pattern inside the aperture without moving the light. Aim at Cursor, Add Preview Wall.
My PresetsLite: Save the whole projector — patterns, effects, trace, colour — as named JSON in your Blender config, so looks follow you between files. Copy and Paste Settings move a look onto every selected projector.
Scene HelpersFree: Demo Target, Atmosphere, Optimise Render for Lasers, Add Camera Look, Update Node Groups, Re-render Thumbnails.

03 · Library

Thirty-four presets

Seven categories, every one animated. Free ships eight, Lite adds twenty-five, Image / Video is Pro. The mono line under each name is what it does when you press play.

Grids

Repeating cells. The projector default and the easiest thing to read on a face.

Dot matrix pattern — Dot MatrixDots pulse in size

Checker pattern — CheckerSlides diagonally

Voronoi cell pattern — CellsVoronoi walls drift

Crosshatch pattern — CrosshatchTwo families counter-scroll

Scans

Bars and lines that travel. The club look, and the one that reads best through haze.

Scan bar pattern — Scan BarOne bar sweeps and bounces

Scan lines pattern — Scan LinesMany lines roll

Cross scan pattern — Cross ScanTwo axes, two rates

Diagonal stripes pattern — Diagonal StripesStripes march

Barcode pattern — BarcodeRandom bars stream sideways

Radial

Everything that turns around the centre of the aperture, or runs out from it.

Radar sweep pattern — RadarSweep with a fading trail

Starburst pattern — StarburstSpokes turn

Crosshair reticle pattern — CrosshairTick ring rotates

Perspective tunnel pattern — TunnelRings fly inward

Organic

Noise-driven and continuous. These are the ones that look like they were filmed rather than generated.

Contour lines pattern — ContoursTopographic lines morph

Caustics pattern — CausticsTwo filament layers fold

Plasma pattern — PlasmaDistorted bands writhe

Interference fringe pattern — InterferenceMoire fringes beat

Facets pattern — FacetsWeb drifts, cells flash

Glitch

Stepped rather than smooth. Everything here animates on hard cuts, not curves.

Data rain pattern — Data RainDots fall per column

Glitch grid pattern — Glitch GridRows jolt in steps

Flicker bars pattern — Flicker BarsBars switch randomly

Digital noise pattern — Digital NoiseBlocks flip per step

Strobe pattern — StrobeWhole beam flashes

Beams

Built for the volumetric beam system. The shader and the mesh share one set of settings.

Beam fan pattern — Beam FanA row of beams sways

Beam cross pattern — Beam CrossScattered beams cross

Beam ring pattern — Beam RingA circle turns and breathes

Beam scan pattern — Beam ScanA bar of beams sweeps

Custom

The two that are not procedural — plain light, and your own artwork.

Flood, an unpatterned beam — FloodNo pattern, plain light

An image projected as a laser pattern — Image / VideoYour still, clip, text or logo

Spiral · Speed 0.596 frames, seamless

Looping

Animation runs on seconds, not frames, so a preset loops cleanly when the frame range matches its own period rather than whatever your scene happens to be set to. Spiral at Speed 0.5 has a period of exactly 4 s — 96 frames at 24 fps, 100 at 25. Change the scene frame rate and the motion stays put.

Time Offset staggers a rig of projectors running the same preset, so a bank sweeps instead of moving in lockstep.

04 · The stack

Layer it, bend it,
draw it, play it

Four stages sit between the preset and the beam. Each is optional and each applies to every preset. A stage that is off is linked around rather than muted, so it keeps its settings and costs nothing to render.

Second PatternLite

Any second preset on top of the first, with five ways to combine them. Below: a Grid alone, then the same Grid against a Scan Bar in each blend mode. A grid cut by a scan bar is a different pattern to either one.

A green grid projected on a wall, no second layer — Grid aloneNo second pattern

Grid and a bright horizontal bar both visible — ScreenBrightest of the two

Only the part of the grid inside the scan bar is lit — MaskB cuts A

A short band of grid where the two patterns overlap — IntersectLit only where both are

Grid with the bar blown out to solid light — AddSum, clamped

Grid with a dark band punched through it — SubtractB punched out of A

EffectsLite

Shape bends the coordinates before the pattern is drawn, so it reshapes the geometry rather than dimming it. Level reworks the finished pattern.

The Facets preset three times: as drawn, folded into mirrored kaleidoscope wedges, and reduced to outlines — PlainShape · **Kaleidoscope**Level · **Outline**

Galvo TracePro

A real show laser draws with one moving dot. Switch this on and the pattern is hidden, then revealed along a scan path behind a bright head with a decaying trail — the authentic ILDA look, and a drawing-on reveal for any preset in the library. Raster, Radial, Spiral or Linear; set the scan rate, head length and boost, trail and glow, and a persistence floor so the rest of the pattern stays faintly visible.

Galvo trace · rasterOne dot, one trail

AudioPro

Bake a track’s loudness — band-limited, with attack and release, or a hard square gate — then route it at Light Power, Global Speed, or any knob on the pattern, second pattern, effects, trace or colour stages. Each route gets a Quiet and a Loud value mapped from the clip’s measured range, and the routes are ordinary Map Range nodes you can tune by hand afterwards.

Baked track · power + speedBake once, renders anywhere

05 · Volumetric beams

Beams in the air,
without the fog

Real volumetric scattering is the expensive way to see a beam. The Beams panel builds them as geometry instead — seconds to render, works in Eevee, casts no shadows.

A dark armoured figure with red laser beams fanning past it in a haze-free room — Beam Fan · mesh tubesNo volume in the scene

One thin emissive tube per beam, from a Geometry Nodes modifier parented to the light, raycast onto a Hit Surface so each stops exactly where the light lands.

Four beams presets

Beam Fan — a row that sways.Free
Beam Cross — scattered beams crossing: the warehouse-installation look.
Beam Ring — a circle that turns and breathes.
Beam Scan — a bar of beams sweeping and bouncing.

Four groups of controls

Shape — Radius (0.003 m for hairlines), Taper, Max Length, Hit Surface.
Look — Intensity, Edge Glow, Halo Size and Strength, Forward Scatter, Extinction per metre.
Hit Spots — an emissive disc where each beam lands. Noise-free, so the real light can stay dim.
Life — Dust Speckle and Scale, per-beam Flicker, Fade Out.

A close crop of the same figure with red beams converging past it — Beams in a haze-free roomCasts nothing

Where the settings live

Beam count, width, sway, speed and seed are in Pattern Settings and drive the geometry through drivers, so the shader and the mesh always agree — change the beam count once and both follow.

For patterned beams in air, a grid hanging in haze, you still want Add Atmosphere and real scattering. Keep density at 0.01–0.03 and let the denoiser work.

06 · Noise

Laser-thin, and clean

Noise is baked into the technique: the light is transparent everywhere except the lines, so most samples land on nothing. Two things fix it, and the first one is the light type.

Same hairline grid, 3 m throw	Area, 1° spread	Spot, Blur 0
Line width	~5 cm (spread × distance)	as thin as you set it
At 256 samples	still speckled	clean
At 4 samples	unusable	anti-aliasing only

A Spot with Blur 0 is a point light, so Cycles evaluates the pattern at one deterministic position per shading point. An Area light samples at random across its surface and, at the 1° minimum spread, almost every sample misses the line.

New projectors default to Spot. Convert to Spot matches an Area’s footprint at the current hit distance and keeps every setting; To Area reverses it.
Optimise Render for Lasers sets projectors to direct light only, clamps indirect, turns on guided denoising and caps bounces.
Keep Power moderate and add bloom in the compositor — see 07. A hairline plus glow is what a real laser looks like on camera. Widening the line is not.
Let mesh beams and Hit Spots carry the brightness: they are camera-visible geometry and render clean at any intensity.

A green radial pattern of hairline rings and spokes thrown from a visible beam cone onto a dark floor — Hairline rings and spokesThin, and clean

07 · Compositor

The camera look

A laser in a photograph never looks like a laser in a raytracer. The beam is clean geometry; the camera is not.

The same bust lit by red laser lines twice: the raw render, then the same frame with bloom, halation and streaks added — Raw renderLaser: Camera

The Laser: Camera compositor node between Render Layers and Composite, with a slider for each stage — One nodeA slider per stage

Scene Helpers ▸ Add Camera Look drops one compositor group, Laser: Camera, between Render Layers and the output. It puts the artefacts back, and it is where the brightness of a laser actually comes from. Every stage has one slider; 0 switches that stage off.

Stages run in optical order — exposure, bloom, streaks, halation, dispersion, vignette, grain — because that is the order a real camera applies them, and swapping any two looks wrong in a way that is hard to name.
Every stage is a crossfade between the clean image and the affected one, so it behaves identically from 4.2 to 5.2 even though the Glare node’s settings cannot be linked on 4.2.
Grain needs Blender 4.5 or newer and is simply absent below that.
Streaks are what sell the frame as a photograph rather than a render.

08 · Editions

One tree, three zips

A lower tier is produced by deleting whole modules, so code that is not in the zip cannot be unlocked. The package folder is the same in all three, so a .blend crosses editions and upgrading is install-over-the-top.

	Free	Lite	Pro
Price	free	$19	$34.99
Presets	8	33	34
Area and Spot projectors Placement, wavelength colour, camera look	✓	✓	✓
Volumetric beams The panel itself is in every edition	Beam Fan	all four	all four
Second pattern Five blend modes	—	✓	✓
Effects Shape and Level	—	✓	✓
Rainbow, per-element colour Per Element needs a preset with discrete cells, bars or beams	3 presets	all of them	all of them
Saved presets, copy / paste	—	✓	✓
Galvo trace	—	—	✓
Audio reactivity	—	—	✓
Image / video, text, SVG	—	—	✓

09 · Under the hood

What the panel is writing

Nothing here is hidden from you. Open the light in the Shader Editor and every stage is an ordinary node group you can extend.

Aperture UV→ Placement→ Shape→ Pattern A/Pattern B→ Blend→ Trace→ Level→ Mix Shader(Transparent ↔ Emission)

The aperture UV is a centred square, −0.5 to 0.5. Area lights use the Geometry node’s Parametric output; Spots divide the outgoing direction by −Z and scale by 1/(2·tan(cone/2)), driven live from the cone angle — which is why a preset looks identical on either light type.
Time is a Value node driven by frame × fps_base / fps, so animation is in seconds and survives a frame-rate change.
Patterns are shared node groups named Laser: <Name>, and their group inputs are exactly what Pattern Settings draws. Add a socket and the panel draws it.
Disabled stages are linked around rather than muted, so they keep their settings and cost nothing to render.

A boulder in a dark field mapped with glowing green contour lines that follow its surface — Contours · SpotLight, not a texture

Known limits

Projected patterns are Cycles only — Eevee ignores light node trees. Mesh beams still work.
An Area projector’s beam is exactly the size of the light, so a 4 m object needs a 4 m light, or a Spot.
Audio baking needs a Blender window. Bake once, save, and the curve renders fine on a farm.
Switching away from the Image preset and back forgets the image.

Compatibility

Blender 4.2 LTS and newer, tested through 5.2 LTS. Installs as a zip through Install from Disk on all of them.
Grain in the camera look needs 4.5; everything else is on every supported version.
GPL-3.0-or-later. What you make with it is yours, commercially or otherwise, and updates are free for owners.
Panel lives in the 3D viewport sidebar, N ▸ Laser.

Laser Projectorfor Blender