Why cant I get any refractive caustics with mia_materials and the sun-sky directional

[bkircher]

Do you use the Bounding Box under the Physical Sun attributes?
That should solve this problem.

[bgawboy]

Did bkircher's suggestion help?

To double check, you have turned on refractive caustics for the mia_materials, correct?

An mia_material object uses either transparent shadows or refractive caustics, not both. That switch means you will actually use the caustic photons rather than a shadow shader to achieve the effect.

The same mia_material you use should be in all three slots, material, shadow, photon, if you look in the mental ray tab of the shading group.

As a test, I like to turn my photons on to a different color like red, but you already have the messages saying that the photons are not getting anywhere.

That also means there needs to be a diffuse surface collecting the caustics, and that diffuse surface needs to have the proper photon shader. So I assume your diffuse surface is also made of the mia_material and that is in all three shader slots, material, shadow, and most importantly for this, photon?

[lollygag]

Thanks for your replies.. the problem in the end was that i lost my light links when i deleted my
original directional light and added the sun and sky...

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