Hi All,
I have reached the point where I want to render colored glass with caustics.
I saw some old posts (a couple of years old) about caustics but there were over 100 replies and cross links.
I am just wondering if anyone can give me the low down on caustics. Was it ever integrated into Blender official release?
How can I use it?
Can someone attach a BLEND file?
Thanks:RocknRoll:
True caustics have yet to be added to the BI render engine. In the past there have been options for faking caustics using textured lamps and some node work. Your best bet for caustics is still to use an external render engine like Yafray, Yaf(a)ray, Indigo, or Lux.
I actually tried the 2.43 build with caustics and it worked ok. Then I closed out and accidentally launched the 2.43 blend into 2.47 and it rendered exactly the same! The caustic controls were missing, but Blender, somehow, figured out how to render it the same. Also when I added another light in 2.47 the whole scene quit working.
So I wonder why these improvements are not regularly integrated into the main branch?
I have tried out the true sky graphicall build and the ocean sim as well. These seem like nice features, but will they be integrated?
The sun/sky feature has already been added to trunk. 
I too wouldn’t mind the caustics being added.
External render engines such as Yafray, Indigo, Lux as DichotomyMatt has said can do this as well as VRay:
@Odeas:
Yeah, but then I need additional exporters and the lights don’t match when I switch from Blender Internal to Yafray. So you can’t go back and forth. Also, with the release of Yaf(a)ray, it is even more cumbersome to export the scene and launch external processes.
Why aren’t these systems just integrated? (I like to push a single button and get a render).
Bit of extra work for the extra bells I guess.
I know what you mean though I’ve tried Yaf/Lux/Indigo/VRay and although I wish they were better intergrated I know that for the bit of extra fiddling I can get nicer results with some extra features (even if i’ve not worked them all out yet 
)
For rendering time’s sake I’ve found VRay to be the quickest so far but you can only run the demo for free to a max resolution of 600x450. (but you can see the render time in the above shot)
Thanks for the advice, I just tried out LUX and dang is it slow.
For rendering times i’d guess they’d go in this order from quickest to slowest (my guess no testing done!)
VRay>Yaf>Lux>Indigo. Though Lux and Indigo may be other way round I’d say first 2 are correct.
I find adjusting to the new light setups between each renderer to be the most difficult as I’m frankly rubbish at lighting to begin with!
I’d like to see an option for BI caustics as well (if any aspiring caustics developers are reading).