Disco ball and effect In vray

[Sho-Time1]

Greetings all. Im working on a project in which a disco ball will be located in the middle of the scene.. does anybody have suggestions on how to create the disco ball and the effect of light bouncing around the room? I'm not having very much luck...any comments or suggestions are appreciated.

[heni30]

TurboSquid has about 50 different ones for sale.

[Sho-Time1]

Thanks,

 

More so looking to create it myself...without paying.

[Francisco Penaloza]

Physics my friend.

Yo need to create a ball with flat faces as mirrors. Not a default perfectly rounded sphere as Max by default will do.

Create a sphere, not many subdivisions. then transform to edit poly, then erase all smooth groups on it, you'll see the sphere will look faceted (this is good in this case)

then you could extrude or bevel all the faces and give a mirror material to it, all the other parts of the sphere should not be reflective, this will simulate the many flat pieces of glass that made a disco ball. You could add a small noise modifier too to create more variation between the angle of the faces.

Point your light to the sphere, you should use spot lights, or directional area lights not regular rectangle light, you don't want a even illumination you need a focused illumination.

then activate caustics and you are ready to go

[Sho-Time1]

You are the man!

[Chris MacDonald]

We used caustics to animate this effect once - it looked brilliant. Highly recommend doing it that way.

[kriskar]

Awesome suggestion Francisco!

 

I was wondering how to create a disco ball effect a while back. Thanks for the explanation!