I’m trying create an ISO surface look using Vray Metaballs and the “use texture” “field texture” parameter. The effect I’m going for is an implicit surface that is booleaned by its own bounding box (see attachment). Problem is the VRayDistance map does not work with a VRay Metaball as it’s input. Any ideas on how to achieve this effect would be appreciated.
So how are you doing this now?
Is that whole thing a VRayMetaball object now? (Or at least the parts that get chiseled away to form the statue?)
A Falloff map seems to work. Set it to distance blend. I had trouble with the local and world coords settings (may need to play with the object xyz option in the metaball settings). But if you use object and set the fall off to object mode it makes a spherical falloff (set the Mix curve to a vertical line) If the radius is big enough the sphere resembles a plane.
What you are doing looks really interesting. Is the goal to have everything get cut away revealing the statue, or what?
FYI. A Bercon Gradient with Obkect XYZ works even better. You make the gradient stepped and you can adjust where you need it. Though I do seem to be getting some artifacts.
VrayClipper might be very useful in this case:
Scene: http://ftp.chaosgroup.com/support/scenes/metaball\_clip.max
Great find! I’ve never heard of the V-Ray clipper. Is it something I need to download? I think this with metaball approach will work.
Thanks!
-chad
VRayClipper is a new feature which was introduced with the release of V-Ray 3.0 (Chaos: Industry-leading design and visualization software), it’s part of the installation.
More info here: Chaos Docs
Clipper is great, but we would LOVE for it to support arbitrary meshes. Think of the cool boolean stuff that could be achieved!
As Vlado mentioned, we are working on it. 
Great to hear!