Who doesn't love some shiny crystals? I spent many years using Mental Ray, so to finally jump into a cutting edge render engine like Redshift was pretty incredible. Same ideas but with years of advancement, so the knowledge transferred easily.

So I was curious to explore the caustics in Redshift and see how far I could push the true refractions. I had originally wanted to crank the dispersion up super high and get some wild rainbows, but I was just so entranced by this more realistic look. I tried some different lighting setups and also played with a few HDRI environment maps, but in the end the best look was a simple area light in the background acting kinda like a photo lightbox used for negatives.

An absurd amount of polygons are in this scene, just to get the refractions going really crazy, and that made doing an animated poly-reduce very slow. But it came all together with some patience. The shards scene was a nice surprise when playing with the poly-reduce and I was amazed by the beautiful colors of the dispersion.

The 'sparkle' scenes were a last minute addition when I realized that I was missing some necessary twinkling that crystals demand. But I didn't render the sparkles into any of the scenes directly so as to be more useful during a live performance. Sparkles at your command!

Released November 2020