WTF?? How do I have caustics??

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

I am using 2.48.1 32 bit on 64 bit Vista.
I rendered in BI, normal average render, no caustics, am ok render. It took a while, so I turned on render simplification (the RT next to the play button) and adjusted the settings until I got a limit of subsurf to 4, Shadow Samples at 10, and AO and SSS at .5. Sure it rendered a sh!tload faster, but WTF??? I saw something . . . are those caustics? Yes those are caustics! Accurate caustics! Fast caustics! Faster than normal rendering! WTF? Is this some kind of a joke Blender Foundation? Take a look:
http://forum.nystic.com/download/file.php?id=5586

Or is this some sort of those “accidental” bugs BF made?

BTW, my x and Y parts were 10x10, I doubt that has to do with anything though.

2

I think that’s shading, not caustics.
did you try rendering from diffrent views? like one where the water is not in the way of the ground?

3

Looks like distorted reflections to me, on some sort of Voronoi way.

4

the blotchy black dots (lots of them resulting in bright caustic-like streaks) at the bottom of pool are most likely aao artefacts due to the render simplification.

.andy

5

So were now on our way to learning, kinda, how to fake caustics, now for some compositor magic. :slight_smile:

6

another angle would help.

7

So is this the secret to getting decent fake caustics in BI?

If this is a bug making caustic-like patterns then maybe have it made into an option until we get photon mapping.

8

there is this feature in yafaray

you should look at their renderer
and you could get much better results

Saluattions

9

@Ricky: Yeah, I was using Yafaray, it’s faster, but it doesn’t give me the freedom for materials, the results also aren’t as I want em.

@All: Yeah, I did other angles, they have “caustics” too. I tried the same settings in another scene and it didn’t work. @ndy is most likely right.