Challenge #871 "Caustics" (28/02/20) Entries CLOSED

I did my best under the circumstances :slight_smile:

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Here is my PURE entry “HF” if it’s not too late.

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I was wondering if someone would take the other meaning of caustic into account. I debated making a scene with leaking batteries.

Perfect timing :smiley:

Caustic Corrosion


Non-competing (open). I used Grungit addon (by @abdoubouam) for texturing the pipe in the foreground. The pipes in the background have sloppy procedural textures.

According to wikipedia caustics are a type of chemicals which are very corrosive (like caustic soda). Even though the optical meaning of the word sounded more challenging and interesting, I really couldn’t lose an opportunity to do some industrial art.

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I’m doing it! lol. Different scene, but using BR again lol…man.

Thing is, the roof top scene in last contest–I didn’t add a watery/snowy rooftop for the contest entry, but I have added it after the fact. No caustics yet per-say in that roof top scene. But the new scene uses it a bit…I’ll cheat a bit more than the film.

Remember the Rachel interview scene in the original? That’s a great caustic piece…not doing that, but it’s awesome. Classic.

Stellar Nova
Rendered with LuxCore, and inspired by Thomas Wilfred’s Lumia light paintings. 2 hours on i9 9900k CPU BiDir (Reposted with better render)
Pure entry
https://imgur.com/a/3dtx5Kh

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Green Peace jars. Luxrender (BiDir + Metropolis), 7500 samples. Downloaded the LuxCore plug-in just for this and I am suitably impressed. It took about 2 hours to get there (AMD Ryzen 7 2700) and there was only some curves processing in the end to get a little more contrast. The only lighting is a cloudy sky HDRI.

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Ok, not going to lie, was expecting Luxcore to handle my caustic needs, but switching to the engine changed everything, and screwed up my time schedule…it didn’t work. I didn’t have time to learn to implement it properly in Luxcore, and no time to learn the caustic reflections in Cycles…

So, I FAKED the caustics in Photoshop…so, this probably disqualifies me…and if so, I completely understand. But, at least you can see what it possible! :slight_smile:

Here’s to more Roger Deakins lighting design!!

Thanks and good luck!

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Title: Glowing dragon dice
Pure entry. Rendered in Luxcore on Blender 2.82 and only got to about 5600 samples. Those pixels you see surrounding the dice is “magic dust”. I tried to get rid of them but they wanted to stick around so I left them in for effect. :wink:

I’ve been wanting to make this for a while because I always enjoyed the light passing through transparent dice. Finally had a good reason to make a decent scene and to try out luxcore.

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So far, I haven’t checked it out. I’ve seen a trailer some time ago. Maybe I should give it a try.

Don’t worry, there are plenty of these lying around, around here.

An entry is an entry! :slight_smile: No need to feel bad.
However, if you think that there has been to much Photoshop editing involved in the making of this on, you can always make this an open entry.

Well, the whole thing is Blender and Cycles…only the caustic reflections were laid over via a multiply layer in PS…rest is straight Blender.

If it’s legit, I’ll submit. No chance of winning…but for fun.

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Not sure which settings you used, but such a scene shouldn’t require 5600 samples.
In the latest LuxCore (v2.3beta2), all you need to render caustics is path OpenCL + light tracing in most cases.
If the scene contains SDS paths, you will also need to enable the caustic cache and adjust the lookup radius, but that’s already advanced.

To everyone who has questions about or trouble with LuxCore, feel free to ask in our forums or discord!

Capture

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I appreciate the tip, but I have an Nvidia card, not AMD.

I think you might be onto something in the more advanced settings, I ran the render for another 1.5 hours after the one I posted and it didn’t make any improvements, so I probably need to play around with the settings. It’s my first time using Luxcore though so I should do some reading.

The Nvidia cards run LuxCore on OpenCL just fine =)

How do I get luxcore?
Does it cost money?

Nope, it’s as free and open as Blender is:

https://luxcorerender.org/

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Thanks!
I wish I had this before I submitted my entry

I installed it, copied my blend file and got rid of all the cycles materials causing errors. Still don’t understand how this works, doesn’t seem to work like cycles: Trying to figure out how to set the number of samples and stuff…

this looks wonderful you have anything posted about how you achieved … i’ve done some fake caustic testing for glass that turned out good but this is epic