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I built this model and let it render over the weekend on my dual quad core. It is a parabola textured with a silver material with an emitter sphere at the focal point. There is also a convex glass lens with dispersion enabled. I thought the result was pretty cool and worth sharing...
I'm going to test it with different lenses and emitter sizes next. (Also I think dispersion can be turned off for the lens.)

Here's another one. I decreased the size of the emitter sphere to 1/256" radius and turned off dispersion in the glass lens. Also added hdr environment to show the scene better.

Damn that so good

And here without the lens you lose all the extra little caustic effects.

Here's a link to a small animation where I have animated the movement of the "bulb".

http://www.divshare.com/download/5476243-496

Cool!

very nice.. !

Wow, nice!

the lens looks much cleaner with dispersion off.

I wonder, are those little caustics from the facets of the model? they are kind of cool.

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Can we see an image of how you modeled it? Really nice

Burnum wrote: I wonder, are those little caustics from the facets of the model? they are kind of cool.

I was wondering the same. The model looks smooth, but the caustics seem to be produced by a faceted surface, isn't it?

Thanks, everyone!

gadzooks wrote:Can we see an image of how you modeled it? Really nice

Well, I used AutoCAD to create the parabola shaped polyline segments using an online guide on how to construct a true parabola. Then I imported the spline into Max and lathed then turbosmoothed it. I moved the pivot to the focus point so I could create the emitter there.

At first I thought those caustic shapes were from the lens, but as you can see, without a lens, they are still there. The parabola model has been turbosmoothed to level 5 which gives it about half a million polygons, so I don't have any idea what is causing them.

One thing I have noticed about Maxwell's render engine is that reflected light doesn't seem to respect smoothing across polygon normals. It treats it like there is no smoothing so you have to create super-high polygon curves.

Edit: One thing I should mention is that the first image was rendered to around S.L. 25, while the rest are around 12-14. So that might account for some of the caustic patterns that aren't "filled in" yet.

Another small test:

would you might share the scene, although its very simple?:)

Intresting tests!