little caustics test movie

[chikega]

Very cool MoodyB - I see you're settling into messiah:studio and putting it through it's paces ...

Could you elaborate on how you achieved the caustics effect - is there a transparent object with refraction rotating above? How long did it take to render and what are the specs of your computer? Welcome aboard :)

[MoodyB]

Originally posted by chikega
Could you elaborate on how you achieved the caustics effect - is there a transparent object with refraction rotating above? How long did it take to render and what are the specs of your computer? Welcome aboard :)

Thanks chikega :) Glad to be aboard.

The effect was created by a transparent, refractive, bump mapped sphere,( hidden from the camera view ) with a raytraced spot shining through it. Its the bump on the sphere thats creating the caustic patterns. Used ' photon map' for the caustics as I couldnt get the' approximated ' method to show anything ( lack of understanding on how it works more than it being broken I think :) )

I can post the mpj file if you, or anyone else, want to play around with the settings ? ( nothing special in it )

Render time for each frame was about 10secs on an Athlon XP2500 at 2.2ghz. ( I had left Global Illumination on by mistake when rendering this ) Without GI, each frame takes about 3-4 secs at 320x240.

[chikega]

I had to turn up the caustic intensity to see the effect under my soon-to-be overly abused stomach object. I used the index of refraction for glass (1.51714) from that link that Lyle provided. The glass seems to be behaving well - no "air polygons" used a la LW. :)

http://www.3ddmd.com/images/Messiah/stomach_glass.jpg

[MoodyB]

Cool :). Try adding the ' air ' polygons as well, as it will make a difference to the final render.

Think I had the caustics intensity at 3 for the little test I did ( which I've rerendered at a higher res, so it looks much ' cleaner ' - I'll replace the move link later )

Oh, and if you haven't tried it yet, the ' spinning light ' trick used to fake soft shadows in LW works in Render.

[xxpert]

haha

is that render fast?

[Andy741]

that is awesome!

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