Blender 2.8 and Caustics, YafaRay? POV?

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

Hello dear Blenderheads,

very technical problem here:

i’m working at a project and i need Caustics

looks like it’s very hard to obtain good Caustics in Cycles due to the nature of the rendering engine, so i’m looking for other renderers to fake a “Caustics Pass” and then composite all together with the rest of my scene

there are tutorials around the web that show how to render Caustics in YafaRay, and i like the idea but before i install YafaRay, Python and Addons on my Windows workstation, i’d like to be assured YafaRay and its Plugin are compatible with Blender 2.8x, 'cause can’t find information about this

in case YafaRay and 2.8x don’t go very well together, is it a viable solution to use Persist Of Vision? the plugin is available in the Addons

can i render animations with Yafaray of POV?

any help much appreciated…

2

You can create Caustics with Cycles, but Caustics needs high sample values. Nearly all render engines needs high sample values for create Caustics.

You can create fake caustics. You can find several tutorials for this. Or you can use some paid addons.

3

Neither are a good choice these days.
Use either LuxCore.
https://luxcorerender.org/

or Appleseed
https://appleseedhq.net/

1 Like
4

Thank you Hikmet, are you talking about this addon or you have something else in mind?

5

I didn’t use this add-on. I don’t know.

I can suggest my Shader add-on: Vshade.

But firstly you can watch tutorials and if you think it is hard or you are not want to deal, then you will look add-ons. Firstly you must decide what you want, and which solution to serve your want.

6

Sure? You have caustics in TheBounty ( fork of yafaray ) in a few minutes ( one or two…)
Cheers!
Edit: scene example from Appleseed
00:50 seconds…

imagen
imagen1634×1003 292 KB

7

With Luxcore you can quickly get very good caustics with the best third rendering interface for blender.

Stable 2.3:
https://luxcorerender.org/download/
Daily build 2.4:

8

Your samples is too low and scene is not complex.

You try equivalent Cycles Samples 1024, and put several glass objects and use dispersion.

9

Yes thank you,

i’m considering buying your nodes anyway, there’s a lot of useful staff in there… (maybe too much stuff)

10

I’m glad you like my product.

11

Excellent advice: Lux is very easy to setup, well integrated with Blender 2.8 and amazingly fast!

1 Like
12

Really appreciate that you find an open source solution.

13

Luxrender was and LuxCoreRender is the best opensource render. :+1:

14

I tested Caustics for Cycles:

Cycles Caustics - 1024 samples
Caustics - 1024 samples

Cycles Caustics - 2048 samples
Caustics - 2048 samples

Cycles Caustics - 4096 samples
Caustics - 4096 samples

Cycles Fake Caustics - 1024 samples
Fake Caustics - 1024 samples

Cycles Caustics and Fake Caustics - 1024 samples
Caustics + Fake Caustics - 1024 samples

15

Indeed, though they are easy to set up in POV and depise me being biased towards it and its having both fake and true (photons + final gather based) caustics, you reached the proper conclusion of the long term comparatives:

  • Regarding POV’s “true” caustics, LUX have always beaten them in quality vs time ratio up to now. This will probably only stay true for as long as POV does not implement spectral rendering in its master branch
  • POV’s fake caustics can be much faster though, are not at all photorealistic, but the best option for NPR caustics.