caustics again.

[super gnu]

chaos.. guys.. please can you come up with a revolutionary new way of doing caustics asap..? the current way is clunky, slow and extremely time consuming/unintuitive to optimise.

i want to be able to turn it on, and get good caustics. ideally quickly. on large scenes. plus it should work in rt gpu so i can get feedback for look dev.

should be time to squeeze it in before the 3.2 release, no?


you may have detected a hint of humour there, but it is true that the caustics system is pretty undeveloped/antique compared to the rest of vray.

[super gnu]

on a related note, do caustics work with DR, or is it like lightcache?

[vlado]

It's like the light cache with respect to DR.

As for a good way to get caustics, the fact that no render engine so far has figured out a reliable solution for all scenarios, probably means something There are a few ideas that we want to try out, but whether any of them will be any good, I don't know.

Best regard,
Vlado

[Deflaminis]

I'm sure you guys at CG have given this way more thought than us, but I wonder if there could be some sort of element or diagnostic that gives some feedback about the current caustic setup and make it easier to know what to change. Or maybe a render pass that gives each sample a random color and we can see how well the colored samples are blending together...

Maybe some sort of simplified override material that is just for honing in caustic settings... (crazy?)

For me it's hard to tell which value I should be editing. Light subdivs, density, etc. (And there aren't even that many different settings, but for some reason I struggle.)