I’ve always been a LuxRender user myself, however I like to use as many (open sourced) render engines as possible for the task they best suit (IE Animations) and after trying Yafaray for a bit, I decided to give Cycles a go
The integration Cycles has is lovely, and while it still takes longer to clear up rather difficult scenes (like mine) I have found it clears the render very fast in most cases
But my question is, how can I get a result like this:
Perhaps I should wait until Bi-Dir is integrated into Cycles? I can see a few fireflies that follow the same reflection/refraction in Cycles that would eventually converge to some of those seen in the first render… is there any way to make this faster? I would like animations that can use this as well.
Thanks for any replies I might just have to wait a few months I guess?
I thought that giving the point light a size (0.025) allowed it to be seen as a physical object by the renderer?
Ill replace it with a small plane instead
Should I use the Mix shader on the Mirror object??
Yeah, it’s as simple as using mesh lights - but, you need looots of passes and tweaking to get as good result as you quite easily get in Vray & alike… This is 7500 passes, about 15 minutes of rendering…
Ok thanks man Ill try that out myself Looks pretty good.
Yeah Im still getting used to the material settings in Cycles so I just used the 100% reflection.
Unfortunatly I have an ATI card… so CPU only. I guess caustics from tiny light sources will need Bi-Dir integrator to be fully implemented to be rendered in a reasonable amount of time?
To be honest, for refractions, I’d use Vray (which is my main renderer with Maya but also works with Blender through the vb25 plugin). Vray is amazingly good at rendering refractive effects without putting that more rendertime into it. I love cycles though, really nice renderer.
Indeed, bi-directional (actually, light-camera only as i suppress camera ray chain, it not finished) help a lot in that scene, thanks for sharing .blend, now it is my new most used test scene!
Here real bi-dir render, obviously light contribution from light chain wrong (but we can see low bright caustic). I have trouble to fix weight between contributions, maybe post patch later as is to let other fix that. Light power raised 10x to make caustic more visible.
Mmm, to get it tighter you need to (1) tweak min/max bounces (transperancy & transmission values is in play here) and (2) render more passes. With every pass it’s gonna be a little bit tighter.
