Caustic Prism

A short example of the (miss)use of Yafray's photon lamp to create some prism like refraction. Hopefully, as I learn my way around Blender, I will be able to create something better.
The blend file may be downloaded from:
http://dormouse.org.uk/downloads/prism.blend

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• animation
• blender
• yafray

[ARTIMUS09]

wow, that's an excelent caustics highlight after downloading the .blend file I have a few questions 1) could you explain the use of empty meshes here? I figured they were just used as an extra vertex 2) how did you get the prism effect, I can't replicate it no matter how much I try, and 3) how do you use textures?

[dormouse64]

1) Empties

Using empties was the easiest way I could find to create the rotation effect I wanted. Probably it could be done by directly manipulating the prism, but I found using empties easier to control.

There are three empties each of which rotates around one of its (local) axes. The empties are parented in a chain with the prism parented to the final empty.

[dormouse64]

2) Prism effect

It is not obvious how to do this. It took me a few minutes to rediscover where this is set. First select the prism, click on shading (F5) and then materials. In the Mirror Transp panel there are a couple of settings under Dispersion. Adjust the values of Pwr, Samples and Jitter until you get what you want.

[dormouse64]

3) Textures

Not sure I understand your question. I wouldn't consider this a good example of using textures, suggest looking at the blender wiki where there are some hints and tutorials. Don't seem to be able to post links here, I think the following is as close as I can get.

wiki. blender. org.

[UNiqEz]

damn man that wus awesome how much time it took for it to render?

[dormouse64]

Render time is about 30 hours on a 2GHz Core2 Duo. Should be possible to render quicker by optimising the photon, etc settings in the blend file.

[RoyKead]

Did you try making sure the XML button was down? That's apparently a common problem; it shouldn't crash blender, but it does for most people...

[CollinsGuitar]

Very good job, i tried to render one frame on my crappy computer and blender automatically shut down. Ive been trying to use caustics for awhile but it seems my computer just cant handle it.

[ARTIMUS09]

thanks for the help, I'll give these a try

[UNiqEz]

YEA I TRY'D XML OUT AND it froze my stuff out!