I would like to share with you this caustics’ rendering done with Cycles.
The scene comes with a Creative Commons license.
You can download it here: Scene and elements to share
Attachments
A very interesting and informative experiment, arketip! I will be trying this out for myself.
Brilliant idea using the HDR program to remove noise from the image! I have Photomatix, and am curious to see if it will give me similar results.
As for the final image, it is pleasing in it’s simplicity. I feel the material and overall image has a very painterly feel. Fantastic work!
Thank you for your answer and your comments, James. For this image, it’s more a technical chalenge but I’ve also tried to give it a aesthetic aspect. Of course, this kind of picture cannot compete directly against another images of this forum which are wonderful and creative.
I will be interested to view the mix of the 8 images by using Photomatix. I just added at the end of the page a link to download these 8 separated images.
http://www.ngon-paradise.com/wiki/doku.php?id=3d:cycles:blender-cycles-noise-paper#separate_elements
I’m curious to see if the result could be better with Photomatix.
If you have some spare time, don’t hesitate to download these files and test them.
Well I could have sworn that this was rendered with Luxrender if I didn’t read what you wrote. Thanks a lot for publishing your tests, it has been very useful to me and to many others here I’m sure 
Amazing Job and paper
I was able to find some time to play around with your images in Photomatix, and from what I can tell, it’s not possible to achieve the same results. I believe it has to do with the methods the two programs use, so Enfuse would be much better suited to this workflow. I will be downloading a windows version to play around with in the near future.
I also have a short film that I’ll be using Cycles to render with, and had been worried for a long time how I would be able to reduce fireflies in my shots; especially the dark ones. I’m sure with your method, I would achieve success. Would it be alright if I credit you and link to your site when I release the video?
Thanks for making the test with Photomatix, James.
Ok, Enfuse seems really the best to use for this kind of workflow. No parameters… very confortable
You can use the workflow like you want, it’s totally free to use.
You are not obliged to place a link; but if you wish it, you can use: http://www.ngon-paradise.com/portfolio/
Hi arketip. Reading your explanation, what if Cycles could change the seed every x-samples on the same render? Wouldn’t fireflies get averaged with correct pixels then?
Thanks for the pointers arketip.
Great results in my opinion. Some time ago I had a similar “idea”. I had the intention to mix different images with different seed parameters in a post-production software using the blend modes Lighten/Darken. But your idea seems waaay more precise!!!
I’m not sure if you are aware but Octane has a Photon tracing kernel that can generate caustic pretty quickly from any surface not only glass. It is also free with only limitation that you can only use one gpu for rendering.
In other news, I just heard that Pharaoh Menkaure is planning to build a THIRD pyramid at Giza!! I can’t wait to see what it looks like! 
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