Caustics - Best workflow?

[Deflaminis]

I'm having some issues getting my caustics to do exactly what I want. I've done numerous tutorials and I've come to the conclusion that I don't know the correct order to do things here. I seem to flip a lot between light subdivs, to global subdivs, search distance, density etc etc. I just keep going around in circles and I just don't think I'm going about this the right way. I do eventually get something that's about 80% of what I want but it just takes too long and I'm sure there's a better way.

I've even tried to emulate the settings in the vray help and I get a different result. (I'm sure it's a scale issue.)

Can anyone share their workflow with caustics, or at least the order you attack these different values?

[Deflaminis]

Geez... nothin? Is it the way I phrased my post?

Anyone care to share how long it takes them usually to setup caustics? Any help would be appreciated, I just don't think I've got it right.

[simmsimaging]

Found this thread through Bertrand's blog. I did a quick test and it really did seem to work. It made me pretty happy because I've had no end of problems getting caustics to work out nicely too. Let me know how you make out with it - I won't have any time to play with it for a while and I'm very curious.

b

http://www.3dtotal.com/tutorial/3d_s...austics_01.php

[paolo242]

Found this thread through Bertrand's blog. I did a quick test and it really did seem to work. It made me pretty happy because I've had no end of problems getting caustics to work out nicely too. Let me know how you make out with it - I won't have any time to play with it for a while and I'm very curious.

b

http://www.3dtotal.com/tutorial/3d_s...austics_01.php

yes, I've played with it sometimes ago and it works...

paolo

[Deflaminis]

Sweet, thanks fellas. I thought I'd searched out most of the caustics tutorials but I didn't come across this one. I'll give it a watch here during my lunch break. Makes sense by reading the description, and I can tell from the images something I'm already doing wrong which is using a plane light instead of a spot with a single point of photon emission. Really appreciated.

He really hit the nail on the head with the "wasting of time" bit, that describes me currently.

[Deflaminis]

This tutorial was super helpful, thanks for the heads up.