Save caustics photon map per frame?

Hello!

I’m new here.
I’m have a question: Is there a possibility to save the caustics photon map on a per frame basis? I have a water surface that’s casting caustics and I would like to save out the entire sequence.

Another question would be if there’s a possibility to exclude an object from being affected by the caustic rays? The reason I’m asking is that I have loads of particles, and I’m running out of memory when it’s calculating the photon map if the particles are present. If I remove them then it renders just fine.

Thanks a lot for the help!

Cheers

Hmm, we’ll have to check why read/write per frame isn’t working, thanks for the input.
As for the other questions - you can exclude objects by adding vrayObjectProperties to them and enabling/disabling generate and/or receive caustics. To save on memory, you can use the “max density” parameter - Chaos Docs

It should be possible to save/load per-frame photon maps if you put f.e. %04d in the file name - this will be replaced with the current frame number.

Best regards,
Vlado

Thanks a lot for the replies! Will test it out today.

Cheers

Like Vlado said, %04d is working, only it’s broken in the UI. Let me know if you still need to use this and I’ll get you a script that does the trick, until we fix the render settings UI.

Coming back to this one, it turns out that it will work from the UI if you use <frame0n> instead of %0nd. This means that you simply need to replace the frame number with the <frame> token and include the frame padding (<frame04> means <causticsFilename0001.vrpmap for example) when reading/writing caustics map and it should work.

It’s an old article from 2017, but I couldn’t find this in the V-Ray Maya documentation.

It is recommended to write it as a note in the LightCache and Caustics the V-Ray Maya documentation.