Hey,
Just thought i’d post this… Just messing around with are lamps, renders in 1 minute or so, not bad for a HD image. Ran through the nodes (no GI node) for Gamma correction and the distorted camera.
I can post a few screen shots up of the scene setup incase anyone wants to know how to fake the cuastics and colour spilling? 
The AO is way to strong, the entire image is annoyingly blurry, and the chromatic aberration is painfully unnecessary and ugly. Sorry, but all those things bug me to no end.
As for the test, it looks good. There’s very little radiosity or fake GI that I can see, but the fake caustics look good.
I like it.
Duh, of course we’d like to know! :spin: :rolleyes:
Is this kind of setup in any way practical for a “real” scene, animated even?
Not to criticize too much, but fake caustics for a sphere is not really hard, just ad a point light under the sphere. Fake caustics for a glass Suzanne would impress me more. The color bleed is easily achieved by manually adding “bounce lights”.
Lens flare used to be the big overused thing in general, now that freakin chromatic abberation is. This is a perfect example of how not to use it.
Also, I see very little reflected blue, while I see a bit of red and a LOT of yellow.
There is no AO in the image.
Just area lights and two spot lamps and yes i’ll post the setup now and it would work for animated scenes. Also you can realisticly fake caustics for a complex object like the monkey head, unless you used a texture map but that would be really complicated.
Yea i get it, chromatic abberation is used on the image…
EDIT: yea i noticed the blue area light doesn produce much colour spill, i’ll sort that out, i’ll probably need to up the energy of the lamp.
Also guys, this is just a test, it’s nothing complicated or advanced, but perhaps there are people out there who are using blender who want to fake these kind of things (i actaully saw a thread over at CGtalk with some one asking how to fake these features) but they dont know how too.
I tried faking cuastics on the monkey head… I’m getting really bad artifacts from the lighting though, i guess i need to go revise how im lighitng the scene… or just use the colour spill AO.
You use a similar technique to get caustics as I do :), I was hoping you had found a more effective way to create caustics. You manually place point lights (with sphere) to approximate the flat shape of the caustics object if I see it correctly.
In the olden days I used negative point lights at the bottom of table legs to get a fake soft “contact shadow” that you now get with GI or Ambient Occlusion.
