there is a free difraction plugin out there i had one before, it is just an slightly altered raytrace material that you can adjust the ior of each of rbg separatly,
not sure what version of max is was for 5 i think. it is extremely slow though.
search for it at maxlugins.de
mark tsang
ya close… thanks everyone for th feedback. okay… marktsang,i looked at the site but didnt find what im looking for. ya, the adjustment of angle by rgb is a function i need, but not as an IOR effect. it has only to do with specular reflection(real causes of the effect aside) and… stuh505, to complicate it more,because i can already acheive a passible uniform diffraction effect,i would much like to be able to have a base set of “spread” values so that they may be multiplied by a coeffecent taken from the value of pixels in a greyscale map, such that pixelcolor black(or white) = 0 so that at one extereme of values you have no declination from the standard specular effect, and the other end of the value scale will produce a 90 degree declination of the minimum resulting spread value(for the violet end) the ratio of declination angles of diffrent color values can be a fixed base,and ideally repeat(multiple declination angles for each rgb,such as let all “such and such”color be declined at every multiple,or possibly square of some angle times the value derived from the map)
so that, in the end i can use a map to produce contolled multiple declination angle ranges per surface map pixel area… such as a COA sticker and not just uniform gratings like cds.
i cant help but think this possible,it looks like all the elements are there, i just dont know how to put them together… spreading of original light and the messing with percieved normal via mapping…
again sorry if my language is muddled, and in fact ive no idea how to accomplish this so im just throwing ideas out there with some confused language. part of the problem
i see is that the term “diffraction” is somewhat muddled. one thing can be clear, it is not a light transmission(IOR) effect. it is all about the angle of reflection… anyway before i go on forever(again) ill just let it go at that. thanks everyone