Dispersion with VRAY
By Sven Brooke

All images rendered in 3DSMAX using VRAY 1.09.02g. System Athlon 1800+ 512Meg RAM



DISCLAIMER: Nothing here is in any way a final polished image, they are just the results of some tests I was mucking about with, that I thought I'd share...

I wanted to find a way to creating an 'in camera' dispersion effect, rather than the traditional method of faking it based on rendering 3 passes each set to slightly different IOR values, and combining the RGB channels in Photoshop or similar. After a bit of experimenting I managed to duplicate the effect using three versions of the VRAY material (one each for red, green and blue) combined with a Shellac material, which turned out to be a lot faster to render than previous dabblings with Vray and Shellac. And had the bonus of creating a dispersed caustic effect which i hadn't banked on :)


Its like a disco ball... Click to download AVI.
Each frame took 20 seconds or less to render

By popular request, here's a .zip file containing the max4 scene file and a .mat file. Click to download. Enjoy, and create something funky with it.
May not render properly when first opened. Seems that sometimes shellac and composite materials need to be 'woken up' by clicking on them, going through the submaterials and dragging them to other slots in the material editor before they render as they should.




Test scene with IOR based on glass (1.6). It took a couple of minutes to render


Same scene different arrangement


same scene but with IOR of around 2.417 (diamond)


Hey its that scene again. A test with HDRI lighting and reflections. The severe artifacting on the image is caused by the low GI settings and a small bucket size - I was impatient to see this thing as it rendered. It took a whopping 30 minutes.


Vlado's waxdragon sample with a glass makeover, excuse the lack of antilaising, it was taking too long to render.


Same dragon, in diamond.


 All images created by Sven Brooke with a digital screwdriver