I hope that the new version of Cycles will add the dispersion effect to the glass shader.
I am a jewelry designer and need this effect when rendering diamonds and other gems. The Luxcorerender and its previous versions have always had this effect. I hope you can add this feature, thank you.
3 Comments
There are ways to obtain that with cycles already.
If you don't want to bother about creating your own one, you can download someone else's shader.
Like this one
Proper dispersion require spectral rendering , or at least random per ray property. A naive dispersion implementation would simply split shader into 3 color channels which is barely enough. If you use more channels, you produce yellowish and blueish wavelengths, that will be projected onto the same channels on the 2nd and following bounces. This will make dispersion pattern blurry and muddy. I understand that Cycles was not targeted for jewelry (no spectrals, poor caustics), so that might be one of reasons devs haven't implemented dispersion as well yet.
Accurate and even better artistically tweakable dispersion is kind of a must for anyone working with translucent surfaces seriously.