Progressive Caustics for animation

[HenrikBC]

Will the new caustics implementation in V-Ray 5 update 1 evolve to be suitable for animation as well (as it seems to be in Corona)?

[Moriah]

+1 and work in bucket mode if possible.

[HenrikBC]

Actually - the video presentation for V-Ray 5 update 1 does show progressive caustics used for animation in the arch viz swimming pool scene - so... it is for animation already? Or does it require a sampling amount that is extremely high and therefore not real-world usable for animation? I'm a bit confused.

[^Lele^]

It's a photon map, albeit progressive.
Be judicious with scene set-up, and it's perfectly usable in animation.
Turning it on in a standartd scene, with a gazillion reflective surfaces, and expecting it to converge to anything usable in a short time isn't going to work.

[HenrikBC]

Thanks - I'll just have to give it a spin and check it out.
But, since the disclaimer in the documentation states that it is "not suitable for animation rendering" - does this imply that there is something planned for the future to further remedy this - or is the "limitation" simply wedlocked to the way this computation works?

[^Lele^]

The documentation needs a bit of work on this, we got a bit late to it.
Things may still refer to the traditional method, which would have likely required insane map sizes to be animation-stable.
With this, however, it's perfectly possible to oversample the PM so that it can be used in animation, at the only expense of rendertime.

[HenrikBC]

Got it - I'll just have to make a test. Thanks!