Been doing some crystal experiments using LuxCore recently - here’s one from today! More here : https://www.instagram.com/s.e.a_c/
9 Likes
Nice! U try more transluced effect ?
Woooooow! Very nice! The chromatic aberration on insertection its AMAZING!
I LOVE! Blurry and Shine 
Post print of Material Nodes and making of prints, please!
Sure - here is the node setup for the green cubic crystals with the chromatic aberration:
and here is the volume input:
I’m using LuxCore for the rendering engine with bidirectional pathtracing 
1 Like
Great stuff!
It’s a shame that some of those are quite noisy - how long did you render them?
You could try to use the Path engine with adaptive Sobol sampler, I think it should be able to render these and would be faster.
Did you use volumetric emission for the first image?
As for the making of:
I create the shape using basic objects which are combined using a boolean modifier into a single mesh, and then I use the remesh modifier to add a bit of irregularity to the edges as well as give the ‘pointiness’ node in the material setup a uniformly dense set of vertices to work with. In the case of the cubic one here is the modifier stack:
The original mesh that the stack is applied to is just a really large cube, so that the target mesh on the first boolean modifier is completely inside it so that the intersection creates the basic shape. Then the second target mesh is applied using a union - make sure that the cubes in this mesh don’t intersect with each other or else you won’t end up with a good continuous surface in the end.
They actually take a really long time to render lol, I let them all run for a couple of hours (between 2 and 4). I didn’t use any emission in the material, the lighting setup is super simple: just a square area light placed above the object. Without bidirectional pathtracing the render might get less noisy faster but it won’t look the same, because most of the illumination in these are due to caustics and those would take forever to converge without bidirectional sampling. What looks like volumetric emission is actually just the convergence of rays within the rough glass material. The setup for the for the first image is almost exactly the same as the node setup posted, except the glass material is set to rough with a roughness value of about 0.25 - also the absorption color in the volume node is different as well 
Did you try the new denoiser that is available in the v2.1 alpha releases?
Looking into it. Only having any success installing the 2.1 alpha0 release - alpha1 and alpha2 both give me .dll not found exceptions when attempting to upgrade. Did some tests with the denoiser using alpha0 and it works well, but running it from the UI doesn’t seem to do anything. It does run at the end of a render, but sometimes will not and prints “No new samples since last denoiser run, skipping denoising.” I thought I’d found a way around this by changing the seed before each render but the problem persisted. Anyway, long story short it seems to work well when it runs, would definitely have made the above renders buttery smooth 
Due to a bug in embree 3.2.0 you need to install an extra intel library, see the end of this post:
https://forums.luxcorerender.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=472#p4693
This is the link: https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/managed/59/aa/ww_icl_redist_msi_2018.3.210.zip
The other bugs you mention should be fixed in alpha2.
ahh yes, thank you. Will experiment.
A cool effect I’ve done before (to make a diamond most usefully) is to add multiple glass/reflection shaders with slightly different refraction indices, so you get a slightly more realistic effect.
I used this tutorial as a basis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sk6RFcORd0
This is not necessary in LuxCore, you can just raise the “dispersion” value of the glass node and LuxCore will compute the correct spectral dispersion internally.
oh cool, didn’t notice that bit, I was using vanilla cycles so had to do all that by hand