Diamonds
 

Just playing about with mental ray with a simple model, any crits/ comments appreciated

Cheers

wow that looks really really cool! But maybe turn the refraction down just a tiny bit. All else, sweet!

cYa LaTeR,
MaTt :alien:

I was looking to do diamonds recently, following a tutorial on the net, but they ended up dull and boring. Could you post a little tutorial or workflow on how you set this up, and what features you used (GI, caustics, etc.) I'm not an MR expert, and I couldn't get caustics to work regardless of what I did.

Those are great!

Wow, these look great! Did you use caustics or global illumination for this render?

I love the way your diamonds turned out. :bow:

I try and try, but my renders in mental ray look absolutely abysmal. I'd love to know your technique! Perhaps us, the less educated, could learn a thing or two. ;) :D

Yer that's looking pretty smart, I would benifit in finding out how you managed to do that.

well, to conclude all the replies here...

PLEASE SHARE YOUR KNOWLEDGE WITH US!! :attn:

nice work, gster123. Keep playing with does variables!

Cheers Guys!! Thanks for the comments.

What I wanted to do was see what adding lights to a HDR image would do

I created the diamonds using a poly cube and just used a poly plane for the floor

To position them I set the diamonds to active rigids and the floor to passive created a gravity field then played back the animation to get then into a "random" position on the floor.

I then used a white mental ray dielectric material for the diamonds, adjusting the lor in image (to about 2.6)

The floor was then just the default lambert

I added a spotlight as the Key light, and a directional light as the fill light, (I was aiming to use the HDR image as the back light and to cast some colour onto the diamonds) and adjusted the levels with a few test renders with the following settings (but at a low resolution).

Oh I lowered the colour gain on the HDR image to offset the spot and directional light, just so the HDR would cast its colours

For the rendering I first added a HDR image, dissabling the default light, I set the reflections/refractions to 10 and enabled raytracing, enabled caustics, with accuracy to 60, enabled final gather and set the rays to 500
(i played about with the min/max radius but it didn't make that much difference)


That was it really, just a little tweeking of the levels in photoshop and that was it.

Hope it helps you out!!

Cheers

very nice of you to share! Thanks! :attn:

Cheers for that, I will give that a try and possibly post my results here.

:D

For the caustics, did you have to plug in any light photon shaders or anything, or did the whole thing just work?

I've been working on this, but my diamond ends up lifeless, with no sparkle. It looks like a dark glass jewel.

these look very nice
i like the way u set up ur scene by creating grav field and finding a nice place on timeline
i agree with a few above the white patches are a bit too bright and need their levels to be turned down
i always wondered what white looked like on that material now i know i need to try that material on my spitfire

keep it up

No there were no plugins used at all, just the settings from mental ray that i altered.

When I first statred to play about they did look a bit lifeless but just played around with the colour gain on the HDR and the levels of the light till they looked good.

Cheers

Oh- the real refraction index for diamonds is 2.417 according to this site that shows the IOR for about 250 different materials.

just thought that might help you

cya later,
Matt :alien: