Please add procedural animated caustics

[Elvissuperstar007]

It would be great to add something like this to light sources (IES) for projection onto surfaces, there must also be a dispersion effect in caustic,
Ideally, it should be procedural; using texture sequetion is not always convenient and can lead to rendering failure,
Ideally, this procedural caustic will understand octane volumetrics
https://www.dualheights.se/caustics/
https://youtu.be/0ycPK9Z089A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4J2QHr-cB4

[nuno1980]

Why do you not want to use Photon Tracing kernel under OctaneRender despite quick *real* caustics?

But "Caustics Generator" software costs EXPENSIVE. This isn't recommended because caustics generator has *limitation* with pool only - it is not supported by any other thing specular material (eg: glass, diamond, ice...). lol

[Elvissuperstar007]

Why do you not want to use Photon Tracing kernel under OctaneRender despite quick *real* caustics?

But "Caustics Generator" software costs EXPENSIVE. This isn't recommended because caustics generator has *limitation* with pool only - it is not supported by any other thing specular material (eg: glass, diamond, ice...). lol

this is long, let me explain, I don’t have water in the scene, but for example I want to create a fake caustic effect in the distance, the water is somewhere behind a rock, if I also add dynamic water and caustics to this location, the octane will exceed 24 gigabytes of video memory, I have already optimized megascans, if octane starts using RAM my animation will become long,
This is basically a necessary feature for cinema and VFX, often we create an effect that requires recreating a whole complex of geometric animations, it’s not even in the frame and it loads precious memory, so we need animation. procedures.
have you tried rendering caustic animation in heavy scenes? where are the piles of diamonds and stones? specifically photon engine? How quickly do you get a frame on 4090? for me it's very slow. I have a 4090 video card.

[nuno1980]

Yeah.

I adore your photo about diamonds' (very likely) stones! <3

I don't like "fake".

But we need to add displacement node (and to enable new RTX Mega Geomtry* and/or new AI Neural Rendering*) for (greatly) reduce VRAM size.

* - currently no but under next months.

I don't render any "animation" at PT kernel but yes single-image for 4320p@3 laps of 1M-spp and still-images for up to 960p@1M-spp while animations at Photon Tracing but this does not render any variable caustics and this limits low quality of reflected + refracted lights. About most simple scenes. But few scenes have between 500k- and 7M-polygon ("San Miguel").

[Elvissuperstar007]

By the way, path tracing renders the scene much faster than photon with the same diamond stones, photon is a very slow engine

[skientia]

A procedural caustics node could be achieved via OSL, such as the Procedural texture implementation.

As for the available options: Light filters, Texture file plugged to the Texture and/or Distribution input, is the common approach for many years, flexible and possible in nearly all renderers.

Also worth mentioning there is a workaround for Photon Tracing lack of caustics AOV, via the regular AOVs or ray switch node.


To put things into perspective: Photon Tracing is slower but not slow.
Such caustics rendering quality, and ease of use, was only a "dream" years ago (not that long ago). For most renderers.
It's now near instantaneous in Octane and on GPU, which is quite an achievement.

[nuno1980]

By the way, path tracing renders the scene much faster than photon with the same diamond stones, photon is a very slow engine

What's any thing? Blur caustics or any other? But Photon is much, much faster than PT for render hard caustics from our sun and/or laser source(s).

@skientia: Good!

[Elvissuperstar007]

you believe it too much when testing one frame, I see complex scenes with my own eyes on the top 4090 real speed, Just let the developers analyze this post, they will understand all the advantages of this fake method in work, and the industry will only thank them, Here is an example rendered on Corona Render , if you render honestly, then the frame takes 20 hours, if you render using the fake method, then a couple of seconds, but there is no difference in quality, Ideally, this procedure should be among the parameters of the light source, not everyone understands how to speed up the work, sometimes you need to show sticking a person’s nose
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP6Jr3JHWi0

[Elvissuperstar007]

and now do the same thing only on the stage, which takes up roughly 20 gigabytes of the video party))) should you shoot a video? caustic will appear there in about 5 minutes at 4090))

[skientia]

"Fake caustics" methods are not questioned. But that fall into the feature request category.

The aforementioned solutions are valid and established methods / techniques worth looking into.

That Blade Runner 2049 caustics lighting set is not only easy to setup but also relatively fast to render in Octane. It's already possible as mentioned in the suggested light texturing methods.

The result using a web search caustic texture file as input in the Octane light's distribution: