Hi, I have made some progress since posting this job a week or two ago.
I still don’t know what I am missing with regards texture + MAX + VRay. I have used some decent textures, but they keep looking fussy. In fact the picture as a whole does not look to sharp and I did use settings on the high end or at least I think so :?
The pool/water is the other area I am focusing on. I generated a caustic map with Caustic Generator and placed it in the Bump map slot, but it looks horrible. Instead of creating nice caustic patterns it looks more like lines ontop of the water surface.
Would appreciate all help, just let me know what I need to upload.
Thanks for the tut/file it help me a great deal. If you don’t mind I would like to ask another question.
In your example the caustic pattern so solely created by the distortion of the plane via the noise modifier and although it looks great in real life this effect it also displayed in water bodies with virtually flat surfaces. In this method we loose the caustic effect with the surface goes to flat. Is there an alternative option for more water bodies with flatter surfaces?
Nice one DaForce. I’ve already rendered out a nice animation test over lunch. Thanks.
WWX- Couldn’t you just make the water with tall noise invisible to the camera and subtle noise water visible? Otherwise, you’ve got me. I don’t get a chance to use caustics very often.
WWX:
Glad it helped
Well there “has” to be some sort of disturbance in the water surface otherwise you just wont get that patterning. If the water surface was totally flat you would just get an even light caseinto the water..
Basically almost all water bodies in the real world have some sort of disturbance.
The caustics are produced by the disturbances in the water, as the angles of the water surface change it changes how the light passes thru the water and concentrates it in varies places, thus giving you the caustics effect. If the water was completely flat the light rays would not get affect and just cast an even light on the bottom of the pool. (just like a mirror)
Think about it.. how often have you seen still water which is then hit with a drop of rain or something and THEN you can see the caustics caused by the ripples.
I think you actually highlighted what I was trying to say much better with the sample of the rain drop.
I agree that we rather seldom find pure flat surfaced water bodies, but the pronounced caustic effect created by just that one drop and the relative flat water surface was what I was trying to get to.
I might be totally wrong, but I think if a plane is created in MAX resembling that amount of disturbance we’re not going to get caustics when rendering.
The reason why this is an issue for me in this scene is because the water in this pool design actually spills over the edge into a drainage system. So if I disturbed the water to enough in order to generate the caustic pattern it does not look right along the edges.
Well thats the thing.. you would need to make the disturbance your self either by modelling by hand or using noise and wave modifiers on selective pieces of mesh under subobject mode.. or even use the help of a simulation software.
The point being that to get the ultimate look you need to have lots of little variation in the mesh so the middle of the water would have bigger more shallow disturbance and the closer it gets to the edge the smaller and tighter the disturbances get.
However if you just want a quick way around the whole problem, you can do something similar to what visualride said, but if its just a single render.. you can render with the noisy plane to make the caustics and save the resulting caustics solution then delete or hide that noisy plane, and return your almost flat water plane and then use the saved caustics. This will produce i think exactly what you want.
Here is a simple test… with a plane and 4 ripple modifiers..
Now notice how strong the caustics affect is underwater… that was with the ripple modifiers on very smaller.. only 1 - 2mm variation.. (but i think its more for my scene as its not to scale) but even still very small.
And it made nice strong caustics.
This image shows just the caustics solution.. i have hidden the water.
still playing with the settings, but the ripple modifier is the one for this project as water is faling into the pool from the waterfeature behind the stone clad element.
the effect on the water is coming along nicely, but the caustic on the wall sucks (for now) I think the distance from the water to the wall and the light angle is partly to blame.
Is this correct or a possible bug. By simply changing the search distance under the caustics control panel the water element renders darker.
Anyway after spending to much time playing with setting (well at least it was a good schooling) I still have not been able to produce stunningly beautiful caustics in my current scene. Closely inspected one can see that the effect is present but ever so slightly.
I think I need to start focusing on the other difficulty I highlighted in my first post i.e. the soft, grainy looking textures. If I need to upload settings in order to gain advice, please let me know which. What gets me is how sharp the stone texture looks and how fussy the timber texture to the gable end looks and yet the quality of the texture files is similar.
It would render darker because by lowering the search distance you are basically restricting it to less caustic rays in the given area and therefor wont be as bright. Its a matter of finding the sweet spot.
As for your water… i dont really know what im looking at … the blue and white texture?? im assuming that is the actualy texture itself… i cant see the caustics at all really.. unless the white part on that blue texture is the caustics??
I would have expected your water to reflect more as well.
As for your render .. yes there is something missing/not right.
Can you post AA settings, your first and second bounce settings.. ie.. ir/lc and all the associate settings.
as well as the QMC sampler settings and what you have lighting your scene and the lights settings.
Basically as much as you can
If you would like to send me part of your scene (just the pool area or something) i can have a look at those caustics for you. Also given that it seems your going for a later afternoon type light you may not get all that much caustics as the direct light isnt very strong.
Also possibly the color balance in your scene is wrong.. it seems as if you have too much yellow.. but if your are infact going for a later afternnon shot it may be ok.
For a quick hint i suggest you try QMC AA and Catmull-Rom filter, as well as lowering or turning off the blurring of any bitmaps in your scene. In the material editor under the bitmap rollout turn blur to 0.001 (thats as close to off as you get) and try that.. that should help bring out the details in your textures (assuming there is some)
Sorry for the disjointed post.. things kept coming into my head.. hehehe
