Caustics Better Control?

[Teriander]

For the love of God. Please improve the way caustics setup works. Maybe presets? I find trying to find the equilibrium between Caustic's Multiplier, Search Dist, Max photons, Max Density, Lights Caustics Subdivision, Lights Caustics Multiplier, Objects Caustics Multiplier... (Did I miss anything?) to be a little much. I've been trying to find the right settings for a swimming pool to cast caustics on a wall and quiet annoying trying to find the right settings. Maybe improve the spot3D website with better examples?

I've seen some great results with Caustics, but I've seen a lot of people having more problems than success.

[super gnu]

yes caustics in vray have always been one of the weaker features. heard a few suggestions over the years that new methods/ techniques were being investigated, but we still have the same clunky system as always. its kinda like the equivalent of nurbs in max. works if you need it to, but could really do with a bit of love.

apart from the interface, the sheer size of the caustics maps scares me a bit. trying to do anything super sharp, even for a small scene, often ends up with multi-gigabyte files being written and read. maybe this aspect is unavoidable though.

[Neilg]

Have you tried this method?
I've done this at a lower res and comped in ps, and for animations done a still and projected the caustics result back into the scene so the camera can move around it.

(*) Go to the maxscript listener and type "renderers.current.caustics_showCalcPhase=true " without the quotes. This will cause the photon tracing progress to be directly mapped on the image and re-used for the final rendering.

Notes:
(*) Only directly visible caustics can be visualized in this way. Caustics visible through reflections/refractions will appear in the normal (interpolated) way.
(*) If you are tracing lots of photons, set the Max. density parameter for the caustics to something other than 0.0 as otherwise you'll get memory overflow.
(*) There are limitations on how this works - e.g. it will not work well with DOF and/or motion blur.
(*) This option is experimental. There is no guarantee that it will be present in future versions in the same form.
(*) This option requires additional memory. It may be quite a lot, depending on the image resolution.

edit - not sure if this is in 2.0, been a while since i used it.

[super gnu]

ye this produces nice results, and does work with 2.0, however it has some issues with animation (nice idea to project back onto scene!) particularly when using volumetric caustics (rays chopped off when they face towards camera..) .