Hello everyone!
I recently found a simple way to create a water pool material with caustics using Cycles render.
Obviously is a fake caustic effect, but I think the effect is simple e enough to be used in most cases when we are doing water pool renderings on caustics.
Here is the vídeo on my youtube channel so you can see the node tree there.
For sure there is more to add and is possible to improve the system with some nodes to make the caustics patter even more accurate, but I’m always looking for simplicity in my work because if something is simple so, in the end, other artists could take this simple node and use it as a base for more complex effects (including myself in future projects).
Here some renderings using this method:
Hope this can be useful for the community and I’m looking for to see more people using and improving this method with more details.
PS… besides the fact that this method doesn’t give a perfect result like luxcore renderer, here we have the artistic freedom to do whatever we want with the caustics.