Can anybody suggest a method to create a realistic pool water texture with faked caustics/foam relfections etc etc. All the methods i know involve the use of displacement maps or blend materials neither of which are supported with Vantage. Any help would be much appreciated as I’m out of ideas.
Hi NRH1981,
For the animated water I would suggest to heck the following thread:
https://forums.chaos.com/forum/chaos…31#post1162531
To fake the caustics one way would be to use an invisible rectangle light with Directionality near 1 positioned at the water surface and use an animated texture of caustics, I used the free sample from HenrikBC
https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1Q3u-…Cgd7La6Rw_Va3m
In the end you would achieve a similar result:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c8z3aDi9LMeEeSFefuAQ-5IsL\_4UIRjG/view?usp=sharing
Hope the suggestions will be helpful to you.
Best regards,
Alexander
Thanks Alexander.
We have been using vray-vantage for predominantly standalone render production (its extremly quick in comparison to standard Vray-GPU) and we were able to make a 70%-80% convincing water texture with Caustics using your methodology above.
Thanks for the links; they were very helpful.
With the release of Vray 7.3 and the quick caustics feature, can anyone provide information on whether or not there are plans to implement support through Vantage. This would solve the issue we have still not found a fully convincing solution to for close to 3years. 
Hi NRH1981,
Yes, we do plan to add support for the quick caustics but cannot say when. Keep an eye out on the Announcement section for new features in new releases.
Best regards,
Alexander
Thanks for the quick reply, this is encouraging news.
It’s one of the key things we keep looking for in some way or another. Thought for a second it had finally been solved with 7.3 but alas it’s not a vantage supported feature… yet… haha
Keeping my fingers crossed it makes the leap to Vantage soon.
To get kinda convincing underwater pool caustics in max-vantage one needs to put a caustics bitmap in a direct directional light (with vray shadows, overshoot On and include only the underwater pool surfaces in Include list), and then link it to vray sun.
Hopefully this cheap trick would become obsolete if fast caustics is coming