Hi. I made a simple material with fake caustic hope you will enjoy it. Using this material, turn off the refraction and reflective (like in this file) There's no point wasting render time creating noisy real caustics! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APJaOa70LPE&feature=youtu.be
Thanks! Now I'm a little optimized material and added option to adjust the brightness of the caustic
Nice! For my money Roughness of 0.005 and Caustics of 2 look a lot better.
Then double the render samples to 256 and things look a lot cleaner.
Looks amazing with galileo_probe.hdr (Mirror Ball) set to Strength 0.10.
[I still have to downvote as the HDR cannot be redistributed.]
WOW... this is a fantastic setup!!! It looks way better than real caustics at a fraction of the cost... and no noise! Incredible. Thank you PixlFX for this amazing gift!
-Adam
I currently making a Master Glas Shader for myself, do you think I could incorporate your caustics implementation to the file I post on BlenSwap?
The included HDRi is from a free pack by Maxime Roz and probably copyright.
There seem to be lots of unnecessary Combine RGB nodes but I might be wrong on this.
Likewise HSV and Multiply nodes. And the whole thing could be a lot more organized.
That said, the results look really good.
I think the refractive caustics are much too strong. Energy conservation means that they should be less bright than highlights but brighter than shadows.
Usage note: if you are FAKING caustics, leave Refractive and Reflective UNCHECKED (like in this file). There's no point wasting render time creating noisy real caustics!