At first is was not really trying to get caustics i just loaded in a test object from sketchfab the first thing that popped up was this thing so i loaded it into luxrender gave it a luxrender glass material with some thin film coating and plugged a texture into the bump. I then placed a point light inside of the glass ball.
This was a 15 min render to 800 samples then denoise. 20 million photons with a depth of 64. Camera has Reinhard tone mapper, bloom, vingetting, chromatic aberration and white balance. Then i did some post work in Topaz Studio such as color grading.
The conclusion is it’s ridiculously easy to get amazing caustics with Luxrender and its not slow even on my GTX1070. I wish cycles could implement the same approach for its caustics.
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We all wish Cycles could do that. As far as I understand, the techniques Luxcore uses for caustics are completely incompatible with Cycles and would require the renderer to be largely re-written.
However, there is some developpement happening right now for some different caustics techniques. The newer experimental builds of Blender have MNEE caustics, which allow transparent shadows to have refractive caustics (tough it has to be activated on individual objects).
