Hi there.
I love Cycles for many reasons. Only one thing missing - caustics. There are some tutorials how to make fake caustic in cycles, but let’s be honest: no one produced satisfactory results.
I try Yafaray. You can create beautiful caustics in Yafaray, but missing such great procedural functions like Cycles render engine have.
Question: how to get the best from both?
Answer is simple: combine them together:
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Thanks for this tutorial.
I made this quick comparison with Cycles Caustics :
However I didn’t make sure to preserve the energy properly. But anyway the important is to see the additional detail and the noiselessness of the Yafaray render.
Very nice trick. Thanks.
Thanks for sharing, this is a great idea! I’ve never played around with Yafaray before now, but it seems to create great looking caustics super quickly. Is there a reason Blender can’t incorporate some of Yafaray’s code into cycles? I read that Yafaray was open-source, so that’s the first thing I thought of. Either way, this is definitely a great way to get nice caustics on a cycles render.
@steveernst117 At some point the Bl. Institute or someone else should develop a way to have better caustics but I guess shoving pieces of code from Yafaray into Cycles is not possible. These renderers work differently. They use different algorithms and define things like cameras and light sources differently.