Incluce/Exclude Caustics

[GeraldW]

Hey,

we have a basic arch-viz scenes with a pool.
Almost every time we only need the caustics for the pool and poolwater, we uncheck "receive caustics" and "generate caustics" in the VrayProperties for each object except pool and poolwater.
For each new object we add to the scene we uncheck this options again.

Is it possible to have it the other way around like an include list? Don´t render caustics except for objects inside a list/layer/.. ?


Thanks!

[vladimir_krastev]

HI I don't recall any other method than what you describe. You could speed up the process using some suitable script.

[GeraldW]

Hi, thanks for you reply.
I guess assigning a User-Defined-Property to the pool and poolwater and then running a script to uncheck caustics for objects without this value will be straight forward.

Still, maybe you want to consider adding an include/exclude feature. I think most arch-viz artists only needed caustics on some specifc objects.

[vladimir_krastev]

For sure it will be a useful upgrade in my opinion. I actually created a feature request issue in our system under VMAX-12228.
Hopefully in future versions we will have include/exclude list for caustics.

[^Lele^]

There are benefits to the specific user case (caustics exclusively in the pool, rest of the scene geo that keeps changing), but other than that, i think it's a dangerous approach because of the very nature of caustics.
There already are -unavoidable- ways to control the photon emission per light, but beyond that, one should let the caustics free to do their bouncing, rather than them getting extinguished by virtue of hitting a non-enabled triangle.
That's why the default is active on all the geo, and one would only ever need to deactivate pieces of geometry that aren't a desirable landing spot for caustics (f.e. the house wall behind the pool.), or that shouldn't be casting undesirable caustics (f.e. a small piece of glass on a pool's side table. And by small i mean for screen projection size.).