Noob with urgent deadline and questions

#1

I have to render out some nice caustics to use in a retouching job, and I found the Prism shader for Blender Cycles online and it creates fantastic caustics.

I’ve never used Blender before, but downloaded the OS X version and jumped in. After two frustrating days, I’ve got a glass dragon sitting on a plane, generating some nice caustics.

Got questions though!

  1. How do I make the dragon invisible to camera, so just the caustics render?

  2. How do I get my caustics to render onto a black plane? I’ve given the plane a black diffuse material, but it looks grey in the render.

  3. To create the smoothest render, do I just up the render samples?

  4. Is the render going to be faster using my 12 core CPU, or my 980ti GPU?

#2

  1. Turn off visiblity for camera for the dragon (attachment)

  2. Don’t know exactly an got now time to have a look cause I’m at work

  3. There are a lot of things you can tune a little bit basically upping the sampes is the the most easy and brute way to do it but render times will go up drastically. There is plenty of matierial on the web to investigate further if you’ve got time for this

  4. Hard to tell, don’t know much about GPU integration for caustics, was told somewhere some time ago they where not implemented yet but I might be wrong. If working your GPU should win over your CPU I think