Magnifying Lens Distortion

engineering_f2b8f92af2

I have been creating lensing for automotive head lights and taillight presentations in a CAD program for the customers.  I develope these lenses with the small magnifying bubbles on the inside surfaces.  The first thing I did to see if the CAD program could/would distort the objects on the other side of the lens.  I created a hand held type magnifying lens with text behind it and rendered the scene.  It was excellent.  I made a tail light lens in red and put a point light on one side and a flat surface on the other side.  It cast the expected lens pattern with a point light source.  I exported the CAD file (.3ds) into Carrara 8.5 and rendered it there.  The text was flat, not distorted and the lens pattern was not there.  Something in the CAD program made the solid model give the magnifying effect in glass.  Is there a setting in Carrara to affect the model for this effect?  Is the file type affecting the model?

This is not the run-of-the-mill question or task.  The CAD program I use is Rhino 3d and Flamingo nXt.  Flamingo is fine for good rendering, but I would like to use Carrara as it is a finer detailed program.  I am a CAD Designer to the core and get into rendering because the CAD/Graphics thing interfaces very well.  Any thoughts as to how to get these effects to work in Carrara?

 

Thank You All,

Kimm Z.

3DAGE

When you're talking about a final "rendered image" showing the effects of refraction, caustic lighting, and  distortion,. that's an effect caused by the materials (Glass) and it's refractive index,.

You also need to ensure that the rendering settings will allow (light through transparency)

So,. look art the shader settings for the Lens and cover glass,. and the Render settings.

Carrara ships with a set of shaders,. there should be some Glass example shaders to get you started.

There are also some shortcut's to realism here,.  rather than modeling... use a lighting file.

Lighting manufacturers, produce a set of test results for each light,. ..this is called an IES file,. and they're normally free to downlod and use in 3D scenes,. for example, adding specific lighting to a clients pre-vis of an office building.

Each light's IES file produces the light shape/spread of the light bulb and it's fitting.

IES light files can be loaded into Bulbs and Spot lights,.

IES files can be downloaded from most major light bulb manufacturers. GEC  Philips etc.

Hope that makes sense :)

cdordoni

Carrara does have refraction, fresnel effects and caustics; however, it is not a physically accurate renderer. It possible you may run into situations where you cannot get a rendering that looks the way it should. In that case LuxRender (free) could help. There is an existing Luxus plugin available from the Daz store that allows Carrara to render using LuxRender. While its not free, it very inexpensive. There is also a beta of LuxCore available that has LuxRender build in so a separate install is not needed.

Headwax

could be of interest but a bit confusing

these are random lenses moving around from a longtime ago - the lenses are being morphed into different shapes to see what effect there is

I imagine you could get much better quaility if you lined up the optical centres - and perhaps used higher smoothing values

 

also confusing - this is the view down a compound microscope eyepiece - the objective lens is moving (from memory)  and the eyepiece is staying stable

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1zjKdr4EFk

 

cdordoni

Simulating/Modeling optics in the auto industry is fairly common. I'm a member on a SolidWorks forum and there is some expensive software out there that the SolidWorks people mention they are using to do this stuff. Color is another area where a physically accurate render might be needed. Stacking up multiple layers of different colored glass or other transparent material will produce a different result in each renderer ... its one of the reasons I started using LuxRender with Luxus.