timAugustine wrote:Thank you for checking this, Jason!
I turned it to black and it still looks unnaturally dark. I also unhooked all other nodes and it's still doing this:
scene_rendered_zero_reflection.PNG
material_setup_2.PNG
Regards,
Tim
The main issue of getting darker is a caustic issue. Try enabling fake shadows on the water material or enable either Photon Tracing mode and set your relevant materials to "enable caustics" or use PMC mode. Your render will go slower if you go the Photon Tracing or PMC kernel route, but you will get more realistic results. Just going to be about finding that line of diminishing returns and scaling back 10% To me, 24 bounces is way too many for your glossy ray. You can sorta manually count how many you will need. Generally speaking I just count a bounce for every time it enters, exits, or bounces off a surface before you see it, then double it if it needs added realism. 1, the light enters the water 2, some light bounces off the water 3, it hits the pad, 4 it exits the water, now double this; we can see you can get away with 4 bounces, but 8 bounces will likely look better especially at low angles. 24 will look excellent on small plastic parts especially complex ones but when it comes to bodies of water is widely unnecessary and I would divert that render time / energy back to those forementioned caustics.
(EDIT) Just to be clear, in case it wasn't. Caustics aren't just those nice sparkly ripples of light. They really are important for
any light entering a transmissive medium in order to get proper lighting of objects inside or on the other side of the object. Different engines will behave a bit differently in the regard and it can be more important for some than others to get good results whether an object is inside a medium vs on the other side of a medium so how much of a change you see will be largely dependent on how octane behaves in this regard, but the issue of it looking darker is a common one that is pretty common and usually boils down to a caustic issue, or rather lack there of
