I was about to post “no rush” when you put the model up, thanks! It’s an old idea, but still fascinating – that snazzy photo you took a few weeks ago, then testing with a model of the same glass to see what we can get.
RtFM’s usuallly good advice, and you’re right, that’s working well.
The reason my model of the Blender Community Badge got into the thread is that this started (for me) with wanting to include a recent Blender feature in my submission for the BoBA2023 banner. I’d done Derek Elliott’s tutorial a while back, and although I realize the badge’s shapes aren’t the best for showing off caustics I thought it’d give the render some extra punch. But when I tried it I couldn’t get all the bits to work any more – what you see in my banners are multiple Cycles renders layer-masked in GIMP.
Having done (however round-about) what I set out to do, I tried to figure out what went wrong, which led to starting this topic. When I realized the object IOR was more obvious on the smooth curves of the badge rather than the caustic-casting craziness of Elliott’s granny-glass, I used the badge to demo that part of the issue. I realize the back of the badge isn’t in the best position for clean testing, but the original intent was to catch the most artistic caustics (IMHO), and I didn’t change it when posting here. 