Pool Water / Caustics

[daCaMo]

I am trying to visualize a pool area but i can't achieve any good results with progressive caustics.
I saw the tutorial by sirio and did everything like in the video but it does not work within my scene.

After 33 min rendering i stopped the picture viewer and the result is the attached testrendering.


Whats the secret when rendering caustics?

[aleksandar.kasabov]

Hello daCaMo,

You can check our article about making refractive caustics here. The article was created as a guide to V-Ray for 3ds Max but you could use the same workflow in V-Ray for Cinema4D.

Let me know if that is of help to you.

[daCaMo]

thanks for the article - but i build up my setup just like that.
Progressive mode, Sun Photon radius adjusted, affect shadows disabled,....

[sirio76]

I am trying to visualize a pool area but i can't achieve any good results with progressive caustics.
I saw the tutorial by sirio and did everything like in the video but it does not work within my scene.

After 33 min rendering i stopped the picture viewer and the result is the attached testrendering.


Whats the secret when rendering caustics?

Hi,
don’t know what’s going on, is it a simple scene like the one in my tutorial or is a complete scene? Because a complete scene will be a lot harder to render using the progressive caustic mode since every single object/material will contribute.
In my experience the progressive mode works nicely for simple scene but for complex scene a traditional customized caustics setup is still the way to go.

[daCaMo]

Unfortunately i have a large scene with a lot of trees, stones, grass,....

I have tried the photon map mode but still cant good results ... until i found out that the sky is the problem.
Do the caustics only work with Vray Sun without sky??
another question - Is it possible to render caustics in "bucket mode"?

[sirio76]

Unfortunately i have a large scene with a lot of trees, stones, grass,....

That's the issue, progressive caustic mode is not the best solution for that.
My advice is to use the traditional mode (remember to save the caustic map), keep visible only essential elements that will affect caustics significantly, turn off all other objects that will not contribute but that will still require computing resources. Once saved you can load the caustic map and turn on all other objects, it will work in both progressive and bucket mode.
In this scene for example I build the map with only the pool and the wall/ceiling elements: