Is Caustics Possible?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

I’ve been looking at a bunch of projects on the various forum discussions and was wondering if caustics was possible for things such as glass and water?

I have a project working with high quality renders like the architectural stuff and am using mental ray for reflection, refraction and caustics.

I know reflection is already possible and i think refraction is, what about refraction though? Is that something to think about the near future or would it eat up way too much power still?

2

I’d suggest using this. Caustics Generator - Seamless water texture rendering

3

That’s something similar to GI, it could be added to Lightmass, but calculating it in real-time would take a lot of resources.

4

That’s going to be something you will likely want to fake in the shader, as other have said it will be fairly costly to do it ‘for real’. Depending on the use case you should be able to get some really nice effects in the shader though.