caustics for idiots

[vlado]

Ok; will see what can be done about it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[peterguthrie]

my workflow currently:

- hide my water objects (material has affect shadows ticked as otherwise it looks weird)
- unhide my specially prepared caustics water (material has affect shadows unticked) the water is set not to be visible to camera
- calculate the caustics with about 7500 subdivs on the direct light (takes about 10 mins per frame)
- let it render on progressive for a few mins (caustics render element gets clean really quickly)
- comp it together with the normal render

[peterguthrie]

(and of course I have the water generating caustics but nothing else in the scene to try and speed it up)

i can send you a stripped down scene if you want Vlado

[trixian]

Slightly off topic, but I have always wanted a "wave generator" like this, where I feed it a shape (closed 2d spline) for the water surface, let it simulate a bit so waves propagate all through the surface and bounce off the edges, and then just have it let me export a displacement map for the waves (still or sequence) to use in vray.
This would be great for lakes and pools. Tried using a flex-setup that does something similar some time ago, but it is crazy slow and unstable, and not exactly fast to set up.
Does anyone know of something remotely like this?

[peterguthrie]

Slightly off topic, but I have always wanted a "wave generator" like this, where I feed it a shape (closed 2d spline) for the water surface, let it simulate a bit so waves propagate all through the surface and bounce off the edges, and then just have it let me export a displacement map for the waves (still or sequence) to use in vray.
This would be great for lakes and pools. Tried using a flex-setup that does something similar some time ago, but it is crazy slow and unstable, and not exactly fast to set up.
Does anyone know of something remotely like this?

me too - posted about it here: http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthr...ter-simulation

[trixian]

Ah, sorry for hijacking. I thought I might have read something along these lines earlier. Obviously I'm too lazy to do a search sometimes