Laser scanner shadowing I've been searching for a few days now to no avail, no doubt it's my searching skills which are lacking. But I'm trying to represent how an industrial laser scanner sees the world (especially how the laser scanner creates its own shadows with the objects it interacts with).

Where the field of view of the scanner emmits a red field looking forward, and if something blocks the light emmited the field doesn't continue creating a "shadow" on that red field.

See the image for an example, notice how the tines of the forklift create a shadow on the laser scanners field of view.



Any help is greatly appreciated
Thanks 
Evan
Sadly you cannot isolate the effects of a lamp on an object in Cycles as you can using Blender Internal Renderer layers.

So I tried building an intense isolated lamp &amp; enclosure. From this I include a volume box for the emitted light to excite. The enclosure cam be hidden from the camera by simply turning off its Object Properties > Cycles Settings > Ray Visibility > Camera.



The material for the volume uses a scatter with a density of 0.03
While the Spot lamp in the box with a slit has a high emit/strength value of 50,000. You can have a wide spread or a narrow beam by altering the Spot angle.

To reduce render time you could build the volume box to exactly match the beam spread of the laser.