Hi,
So recently the feature “Shadow Caustics” was added to Cycles, and I wanted to test it. So I created this simple scene for testing, I mainly wanted to see what that new feature was bringing to the possible realism.
The image I am posting first, is a combined image of the two resulting renders, with Shadow Caustics and without Shadow Caustics.
4K final image, composited from the two renders
Screen shot
Ok, now about the test, here is the image without shadow caustics,
it’s already pretty nice. Comparing, there is a bit of dullness. This render at 4K took 21 minutes with all light paths at 1024 (maxed out)
And this is the image, with Shadow Caustics
The light is indeed realistically concentrated to the tip of the gemstone, and the color of the gemstone is more vibrant, and perhaps too much… Thats why I made a final image mixing both renders, the best of both worlds… And this image took 55 minutes to render, all hairs particules had “receive shadow caustics” on as needed to get the correct shadows on the hairs.
From what I can see, we are getting a slight upgrade in realism, so this is already great news, I hope full caustics (refractive and metalic) will be here soon