Hi gang. Well once again, a huge thanks to eeshlo for this great script.
Here is a necklace & ruby that I made. All materuals are direct export from blender. No tweaks or MATSpider settings at all. I know the gold is way too shiny, but I am not going to go back and render it again for 3 hours.
Anyway, here it is:
Caustics and radiosity were set to “ON” and I used a world light. Let me know whatyou think. I am still learning the materials and such, so I only hope to improve.
BgDM
i can only say one thing: can you or ANYone write a tutorial on how to render in Lightflow? i mean from to p to bottom, materials, lights, etc. I think us noods need it to make better pictures and relax your weary eyes when we publis a WIP or finished project…damn, got poetic again…
Well, to write a tutorial would be a big time consumer. Eeshlo has made all the necessary points in his docs in the new script package. I would suggest you read through those. He has explained the materials and lighting very well in those docs.
Also, here is a link to a tute by Jon Lake http://www.jonlake.com/proj/LightflowTut/. This explains all the necessary steps you need to take to get your meshes set up properly prior to exporting.
All of these have been a great help to me thus far. I am still learning myself.
BgDM
Cool 
If you want a LF diamond, it’s on my site 
Inside the ruby there is granulosity… might try rising photon count and photon clustering.
Gems aren’t easy… I hope you got the right IOR for ruby, there is a list of IOR I posted here some time ago…
Furthermore, to be really shiny gems must be cut very smartly. THe angles between faces must have a given value, so to maximize refraction and light return.
Sadly even LightFlow is inadequate for one really cool phisical phenomena:
IOR is a Function of Frequency!!!
THis means that red light is refracted LESS than violet (or vice versa… herm…) So if you illuminate a glass prism with white light you get a rainbow, and the same is for gems, especially clear ones.
I wish I could find a raytracer doing this!
Steano
unless you like a more “scattered” caustics look, than it is better to lower the caustics photon clustering count, to me this sometimes looks better. Setting it too high will only create a shiny blob.
Sadly even LightFlow is inadequate for one really cool phisical phenomena:
IOR is a Function of Frequency!!!
THis means that red light is refracted LESS than violet (or vice versa… herm…) So if you illuminate a glass prism with white light you get a rainbow, and the same is for gems, especially clear ones.
I wish I could find a raytracer doing this!
Steano
Then I guess it is about time you start to look into POVray or VirtuaLight, both of these have this as a standard feature (chromatic dispersion). You must have at least once seen the VirtuaLight or POVray gallery?
Both of these are much more advanced in terms of features than Lightflow. And if you really want total accuracy and don’t mind waiting a few days for the render then you could always try WinOSI.
These are not the only raytracers to have this feature of course.
To BgDM:
To see what the material looks like, you don’t have to wait for 3 hours to change something and render again, you can use the “Fast preview” preset, this will do the quickest possible render (no AA, shadows, displacement, radiosity or caustics).
Thanks for the feedback Stefano. I actually like the ganulosity of the gem. I think it makes it more real, rather than having it very smooth and shiny. I realize that this may not be true to life, but I think it looks better IMO.
I did not have the correct IOR for the ruby, I am sure of that. I just moved the REF slider in Blender to something that I thought would look correct and then exported. It came out better than I thought.
DOH! Thanks for the input eeshlo. I did not see that there. Will definitely do that on future jobs prior to doing the final render.
Again eeshlo, thanks for this great script.
BgDM
I have POV-ray… never used much… will investigate
Thanx 
Stefano
virtualight now has dispersion!
what a pitty that virtualight isnt available for linux 
cya henrik
Wish Virtuallight was for IRIX. Seems like Pov-Ray have whole lot to offer.
Have anyone gotting 3Delight to worj with Blender?
Powermacg4:
yes , i have gotten 3delight to work with blender. Pretty easy:
install 3delight , get the latest blenderman-version and voilà
Uh, and dont forget to install python-2.01
cya henrik
Like I said above, you can do the same thing in POV too, see the ‘dispersion_photons’ in the ‘lights’ example directory (3.5) for instance.
Hey wheres a link for Blenderman? any tuts out there for it?