Ok, here’s the battle that is going on in MAX for me.  I make an eyeball with a texture.  Over that, and pushed out a little, I make a cornea with a VRay refraction material.  I render out and it looks just as it’s supposed to look.  So far, so good.

Now, when I go to my render elements, and check out my VRay Diffuse Filter, there is no iris texture there; just black space surrounded by the skin texture of the model.  Is it just me screwing up as usual, or does refraction kill any texture under it for the render elements.

Thanks very much for reading.
Mike

Don’t quote me on this because I’m not a Vray user, never used it.
The render elements return values from the first surface the camera sees, not from ones behind a surface.
That refractive surface shows nothing for the diffuse pass because that surface is not diffusing any light, the light is passing through it and refracting, or some of it may be reflecting too, therefore the diffuse pass shows black.
The image of the iris is not diffusing from the surface of the lens, it is refracting through it.
The image you want may be found in a refraction pass.
This is assuming tha Vray, like mental ray, respects the laws of thermodynamics. Light that falls onto a surface will either diffuse or reflect off it or refract through it, or proportions of it will be divided between doing any of these three things. All of the light cannot do all three at once, that’s physically impossible.

Sounds logical.  The refraction pass does have the info I need, so I may have to do with that.  It would be nice to have the eyes separate as the diffuse so that I can mess with the rest of the refraction pass without disturbing the eyes...maybe someday there will be an option to split it out.  Thanks for the help, Samab.

Mike

refraction channel