Help with Caustic lighting

Hi ppl

Sorry if this is in the wrong area or if it’s been asked to death… I don’t know
if someone would have a similar problem.

I would like to render a scene - a pyrimadion made of colourless glass on a plane of white, refracting etc. causing an almost prism like lighting effect around it… I would probably end up adding to the bitmap in photoshop, but
need the basic stuff in place.

I’m a beginner in Blender -though I studied 3d years ago… I’ve been playing
around with a promo scene using yafray and a photon emitting spot light
as well as a normal spot light (the photon one doesn’t create hi-lights) - I get
a somewhat acceptable effect, but still…

I know this is probably a bit advanced for a beginner, but since the scene uses very little in terms of elements (one pyramid, two lights, a plane and two materials - as far as i know) maybe someone can sorta talk me through it?

:o

Thanx for reading this thread!

Reg

J C G

should be easy enough to do. read the yafray tutorial on the wikibook or just google “yafray caustics tutorial” for the basics. what you’re looking for in the prism effect is dispersion. set the dispersion to at least .5 or 1, the samples up to 20 or so and jitter if you want it. these settings are in the material tabs where you make the material transparent. make sure you switched yafray as your renderer or the settings won’t show up

for basic caustics make a spotlight, aim it at the pyrimid and turn on ray shadow. then duplicate it and turn it into a photon lamp, move it slightly so it’s easier to select. turn up the caustic samples in the yafray render tab to about 20 for each “c” setting, turn up the photons in both the lamp and the GI settings and it should work. there a few steps missing but read the tuts to fill in the gaps. good luck!

http://www.yafray.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=868

In the Tutorials Section there is a document about Caustics. In the BlenderArt magazine nº 3 there is yet another tutorial on caustics.

Alvaro.

thanks!!! will do. I know I sound a bit nutters but was pressed for time when entering post.
Anyway…thanks again!!!
; )