Pool water

V-Ray V-Ray Common Tutorials, Tips & Tricks
1

Hello,

I’m having some trouble rendering pool water - caustics. I just can’t get water to look realistic. Could please someone share some tips about getting realistic water?
Sketchup + vray 3.6.
Attached an example of what I’m trying to achieve and what I managed to achieve and settings.

Thanks

35544042_465781923850556_8200119434614931456_o.jpg__nc_cat=0&oh=24481927f82b3ab74a94b41062d1ca22&oe=5B9F25DA.jpg
35544042_465781923850556_8200119434614931456_o.jpg__nc_cat=0&oh=24481927f82b3ab74a94b41062d1ca22&oe=5B9F25DA.jpg1023×682 177 KB

2018-06-17 22_08_38.png
2018-06-17 22_08_38.png716×1309 37.2 KB

2018-06-17 22_08_16.png
2018-06-17 22_08_16.png716×1309 49.8 KB

2018-06-17 22_08_27.png
2018-06-17 22_08_27.png716×1309 155 KB

2018-06-17 22_09_02.jpg
2018-06-17 22_09_02.jpg1925×1088 464 KB

2

Good luck. I asked on these forums about getting caustics to work for swimming pools a while ago…nothing working yet.

Its actually pretty funny timing…I just submitted a ticket to Chaos Group support this morning trying to get help with caustics once again…

I just don’t get it. I can get awesome caustics immediately in vray for max. It just doesn’t make any sense to me in sketchup. Anyway, I’ll let you know if I ‘crack the code’ this time. :slight_smile:

Cheers,
GD

3

I am having exactly the same problem - there seems to be nothing out there - just tried to get basic caustics of light through a prism working and nothing! PLEASE CHAOS !

4

On what kind of surface do you apply water material in max and in sketchup?
Do you apply displacement to the water material, or to the surface (I know you can do that with noise modifier in max), but in sketchup you are stuck with the displacement map.
Also, do you have any thickness to the object that has applied water material?

Because, I get different results when I add a thickness to the water object, and when that’s just a plane (but when front face is top face (white in sketchup) then I get just a black render, but when I reverse faces, then the material is refractive)

5

I cannot get this to work either.

6

The short tutorial is here. Produce nice caustics in Vray for Sketchup in less than 5 minutes,Enjoy!

7

Hey Shiyan lin, thanks so much for your help!..I was starting to think caustics in sketchup were a myth. :slight_smile:

I’ll go ahead and check all this out. One thing I’m thinking is that I always use bump for water and never displacement…that could be one of my problems right there… :slight_smile:

8

Hi,I used to work on Caustics in VFS for more than a week,just really want to see some blur caustics. I am lucky enough to finally discover the myth..

The key to let caustics appear is the right scale of displacement texture,we have to edit the scale in the viewport to find the right scale.

9

Thank you! It’s finally working for me.

I need to remember that caustics will not appear in interactive renderings.

10

So happy to know that works for you,cheers!

11

So… I found out why it wasn’t working for me.
Emit radius for the caustic photons was too large and it just didn’t work. I don’t know why.
But Shiyan lin’s video helped, thank you!

12

The problem is we don’t have such ability to control the VraySun like 3dsmax,we can not control the target point of Sun in Vray for Sketchup,that will add a lot of guess work.

I found a post by Mousa 2 years ago. An easy way to setup sun caustics - Requests - Chaos Forum

I think the suggestion really make sense. Maybe consider adding the function in the next major release? my 2 cents.