Caustics pool

[Crayox13]

Hi all,
I'm using default caustics settings. From above I seem to get some caustics, from a lower cam view like almost none. Water material is from cosmos and I did expand suns photon emit radius. Water materials affect shadows is off. When I use progressive render to check (and switch caustics to progressive) I seem to get a lot of light in, but then on production almost none. Any seemingly obvious ideas?

Edit: material translucency is none and fog colour is that default teal. Depth is 200cm while my pool is 160
Thanks

[Crayox13]

Ah ok, changed distance units to world and distance to 5. I at least see them now.

This is the best I can do. Changed search distance and multipliers but can't seem to get that "sun in pool look". I guess my water object is just not bending the light enough for that distance and wave size. It has noise plus bump on it.

[hermit.crab]

If you're using a VRaySun make sure it's Photon emit radius is big enough so that it encompasses the whole pool. Also, don't be afraid to use the Caustics multipliers (three places to choose from: objects, lights, and general settings) to exaggerate the effect. More info in the docs.

[Crayox13]

Yeah, just realized that. When I was using search distance 1 or 2 I had too high contrast - so sun areas plus black spots. So I increased searched distance to 5 but then it was blurry. Only to realize I SHOULD have black spots and add sky to the mix lol. Only sun was generating caustics.

So this is with general multiplier of 1 and sun 10, sky (dome) 1.
When I increase multipliers I get this burned look so I think I'll stick with this toned down version.

[fixeighted]

For myself, I'd never leave (and thus rely on) caustics in the beauty.

It's probably best to render the element separately once it's how you generally like it, then adjust any colours or whatever else in post.

Upscaling caustics with an app will give you a superior result, at least in my tests, from lower sampled output, so you can gain there also.

Basic issue is caustics remain a pain and are expensive, so use whatever hacks that are available to lessen your stress and reduce render times

[Crayox13]

Yeah. I usually use a big rect light with caustics bitmap in projection but for this personal project I wanted to try the real deal.
So you'd render a caustics map after render is done? Like just as a separate element?

[fixeighted]

Yes, so beauty without caustics then just the minimum geometry needed for a caustics element. You might well get away with doing it all in one but if the caustics alone are slowing down an otherwise quick render, then
to simply upscale with some AI would make sense.