Is there a plugin for diffraction?

[Toby_P]

So I was wondering if it is possible for blender to simulate the diffraction and interference effects causes by the wavelength of light.

Its been a long time since I have used blender however I don’t remember this being a feature of cycles. However there have been updates and such since then and I wonder if this is now possible?

Thank you

[sozap]

Short answer :
Cycles doesn’t support that by default, but you can achieve this with some heavy cheating…
I’m wondering if it’s really necessary except for specific cases, because you can always do some artistic cheats IMO.

Long answer :
you can look at this thread that should cover the subject :

Cycles Spectral Rendering

ONE MORE UPDATE: There is now a graphicall daily build available for Windows which will contain my latest progress in converting Cycles into a spectral engine. https://blender.community/c/graphicall/nkbbbc/ ANOTHER UPDATE: Over on this devtalk topic I’ve been working on modifying Cycles to be a spectral renderer from the ground up. Progress is slow since I’m unfamiliar with the Cycles code but it seems achievable. UPDATE: Since the start of this thread, significant progress and changes of t…

[CarlG]

@Toby_P

However there have been updates and such since then and I wonder if this is now possible?

No, not possible to simulate as we dont’ have thinfilm shader (sometimes these effects are based on light direction rather than viewing angle). The thinfilm cheat mentioned above is waaaay too heavy for me. I’d consider the manual trick; magic low scale, some distortion magic texture driven by reflection coords to drive the color. That alone is usually sufficient for me. But you can normalize the measured output, apply some trig and modulo functions, then rescale it to the wavelenghts you need. It has nothing to do with simulation, but it doesn’t look half bad either.