Rt and Caustics

[RALPH_PINEL]

When will caustics be a feature on RT GPU rendering?
Octane has this and some nice features at a much smaller cost.

[vlado]

You can get caustics from area lights, although they might take a lot of time clear up. There are no immediate plans to do any improvements there.

If you are looking for caustics on the GPU, a bidirectional renderer like iray (with the "caustics" sampler) or Arion might be a better choice.

Best regards,
Vlado

[RALPH_PINEL]

Hmmm, Does this mean that RT is behind the curve for photoreal work on the GPU?
Is this because vray uses photon mapping for caustics? Will this become a hindrance for Vray RT to keep up

[vlado]

You can still do very good images with what is there already. Since the light cache is now supported, V-Ray RT GPU can get you a usable image much faster than any other currently available GPU renderer for Max. Caustics specifically still remain a more difficult case, but you can still render them if you need them - it just takes longer. Things can certainly be improved, but I would prefer to focus on other parts of the GPU renderer for the time being.

If you do need to render caustics on a regular basis and need to compute them accurately on the GPU, then as I said, other GPU solutions might be more useful for you.

Best regards,
Vlado