caustics for idiots

[peterguthrie]

that looks great! How can I make a similar pool surface these days? MassFX?

[samuel_bubat]

Someone told me about a plugin a while ago. I don´t really recall it. It was commercial. I thought it was called something like splashmax.
But I can´t find anything on google.Probabely the name was different. I also remember it was a pretty old plugin but available for newer version.
Maybe someone else remeber that particular plugin ?

[Vizioen]

Someone told me about a plugin a while ago. I don´t really recall it. It was commercial. I thought it was called something like splashmax.
But I can´t find anything on google.Probabely the name was different. I also remember it was a pretty old plugin but available for newer version.
Maybe someone else remeber that particular plugin ?

http://splashmax.scglabs.com/home.shtml is this it?

[samuel_bubat]

http://splashmax.scglabs.com/home.shtml is this it?

I think that´s it. With the exact name I found this.
http://www.3dxo.com/software/4098_splash_max
Seems to be newer but also somehow outdated. No price and it´s nowhere on the Digimation Website. :/
But I ´sure someone pointed me to a version for max 2012 oder 2013.

[Pixelcon]

The ocean displacement texture that comes with the phoenixFD demo is incredible. You might be able to use it for pool water if you dial it down enough.

Not pool water but Tommi from work created this for the evermotion challenge using this Ocean texture. The only 'shopped thing about the water are the large splashes near the water's edge and the grading tweaks...

Surely this would create awesome geometry for caustics...

[Nicinus]

What a stunning image. Couldn't believe it was all 3D until I found it on Evermotion.

[Morbid Angel]

I wish vray had a better caustic method I've recently completed a project with underwater caustics. It was tough to set it up for every shot. Since the water was covering a large area, moving the directional light around for a big coverage proved difficult and also I had objects traveling for large areas so having crisp caustics was tough, I had to have the photon count super high, like 50,000

It all comes down to - use pin light source like spot light or dir light as oppose to area light - it will produce soft caustics.
Use low threshold the lower the search distance the more precise the caustic will look, but you will need to increase your photon count a lot for it to look good. If you see in picture below this is with very low caustic search distance, and photon count of 5000 still noisy, so I would raise that to 10000 and it will probably be fine.



2014 max scene attached.

caustics.zip

[peterguthrie]

I'm sure that will be really useful (and to others too), many thanks Dmitry. Forgive me if I don't give more feedback, don't have time to play around with it right now!

[Morbid Angel]

Np. My issue is with a scene like I attached there, it does not scale well to other scenes/projects. If I was to move this light around, scale the plane etc, the caustics will totally change/disappear (what was happening to me in that project).

[Neilg]

I've got a pretty reliable method for caustics. It works great on 5k wide+ stills. Obviously it wont work for every situation, but for those it does work for it means i can actually use caustics in a production image which basically just isnt possible given the time any other method takes.

http://i.imgur.com/J2bcYpZ.jpg

[vlado]

I've got a pretty reliable method for caustics. It works great on 5k wide+ stills. Obviously it wont work for every situation, but for those it does work for it means i can actually use caustics in a production image which basically just isnt possible given the time any other method takes.

http://i.imgur.com/J2bcYpZ.jpg

That's a reliable approach if you don't need to see the caustics through mirror/glass materials. However you don't need to render several frames. Instead, set the max. density for the caustics to some reasonably small number (2-3 cm perhaps). Then the render will take some RAM, but because nearby photons will be merged instead of simply added to the photon map, it will typically not run out of RAM.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Vizioen]

I've got a pretty reliable method for caustics. It works great on 5k wide+ stills. Obviously it wont work for every situation, but for those it does work for it means i can actually use caustics in a production image which basically just isnt possible given the time any other method takes.

http://i.imgur.com/J2bcYpZ.jpg

Indeed very good tutorial for reflective caustics, but how does one tackle refractive caustics then?

[Neilg]

you dont! it's just to get large scale light patterns to overlay in post later. works real good on external building glass and unique light fixtures - big ones that even a client would notice were missing.

Thanks for that tip vlado!

[peterguthrie]

so refractive caustics arent shown when 'directly visible' is ticked?

[vlado]

so refractive caustics arent shown when 'directly visible' is ticked?

They will be shown, but only if they are directly visible. Caustics seen through the refractive surface itself will not be.

For the spring service pack we are working in a solution for caustics that works well with the progressive sampler and can handle these cases much much better.

Best regards,
Vlado