James Russell Posted January 17, 2011 Share Posted January 17, 2011 (edited) Hey all, Just experimenting with Vectorworks lighting functions. Has anyone been able to refract light using a prism object? I'm using a solid with the glass mirror renderworks texture applied at the moment and although the internals of my prism are as expected the resultant light seems unaffected. Is there a more advanced radiosity function I need to use or a refractal property I need to apply to my texture? Or does this functionality not exist? Cheers, J Edited January 17, 2011 by James Russell Quote Link to comment
Horst M. Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 Hallo James, In the Transparency Channel of the Material in VW2011 you can set the refraction. As far as I know it effects the Light that goes from the Scene towards the Camera, unfortunately not the beams of the Lights. (would be cool, to develop optical systems...:-) AS VW2011 has the C4D Render Engine, there is a Technology called Caustics built in, but this must be enabled in the Lightsource to emitt Photons. I didn't find that section in the LightSetup of VW. I attach some Images what kind of effect you get in C4D with Caustics. Quote Link to comment
James Russell Posted January 18, 2011 Author Share Posted January 18, 2011 Wow, that first image is especially nice! It would be nice, maybe it's one more reason for an upgrade again, hehe. Thanks for the preview. J Quote Link to comment
Vectorworks, Inc Employee klinzey Posted January 18, 2011 Vectorworks, Inc Employee Share Posted January 18, 2011 James, I asked our rendering expert here and Horst is correct, you need caustics to produce the prism effect. C4D supports caustics but this is not currently supported in Vectorworks 2011. In C4D the way you do it is tell the light how many photons you want it to emit, and they bounce around to form the focused patterns depending on how they bounce around. Kevin Quote Link to comment
James Russell Posted January 18, 2011 Author Share Posted January 18, 2011 Kevin, Thanks for asking them. I was hoping radiosity would have done the same process but alas no. I'm personally in no rush for this feature/capability (as nice as the idea is!). I was teaching textures to one of my students the other day and they were enquiring about light refraction through a glass of juice they had made, I was stumped and curious Cheers, J Quote Link to comment
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