Tutorial – Vray Water Caustics
tutorial
In this tutorial, we will take the scene that we created in Part 1 (dynamics) and render it with caustics ON. So lets get started:
1. Create an omni light in top viewport, above the water pool. Go to modify panel and input the following omni light parameters:
To get the “Vray light properties” window, right-click on the light. In the vray light properties window it is important to to set high values for “caustic subdivs” (between 1500-3000 is a good value), and very high values for “caustic multiplier” (at least 25,000) for the caustics to be visible.
2. Make water material:
3. Activate caustics by going to “Render (F10) – Render Setup – Vray:Caustics tab”, after some research, I found out that those numbers work pretty well:
Here are my render settings that I used to render the caustic animation, its all pretty standard, I marked where I changed some numbers from their default values, also I used Gamma 1.8 for linear color-mapping. There is a very good tutorial about gamma set-up here: aversis gamma tutorial
So by now you should be able to see some caustics going on, but it just doesn’t look too exciting enough, here are couple of things I did to make them stand out more:
4. I added more balls (copies of the original ball) to the Rigid Body Collection by following same steps like in Part 1 tutorial, this would create more waves and therefore, more visible caustics:
5. Finally, I increased the intensity of the omni light to 2.0, this really emphasized the caustics!
This concludes the two part tutorial about water dynamics and vray caustics, if you have any questions, please leave a comment and I will do my best to respond with further explanation.
Thanks for stopping by!
-Art
January 20th, 2010 at 5:57 am
please can share the water and collison parametres
please
January 21st, 2010 at 9:06 am
Hi polygonner, I will post the parameters this weekend, sorry for the confusion.
January 23rd, 2010 at 3:20 pm
very very good !!!!!!and try very beutiful methord jest passing mail
January 25th, 2010 at 12:54 am
polygonner, the water-deformer doesn’t need any parameters, you need to bind your water (plane object) to the water-deformer. You don’t need to add it to any reactor collection.
My Havok World (Reactor) parameters are:
Gravity X= 0, Y= 0, Z= -390
World Scale 1m= 39
Col. Tolerance = 3.97
Everything else is default.
Hope this helps!
February 2nd, 2010 at 10:32 am
Thanks a lot for your very good tutorial. I used it to create an animation of house + swimming pool. Couldn’t do it whithout your explanations !!!
February 10th, 2010 at 6:52 pm
kanasonic, you are welcome, will be great to see your version of caustics.
March 5th, 2010 at 3:53 pm
it’s a fucking extrem good tutorial !!!! nice man
June 2nd, 2010 at 12:14 pm
great tutorial but im stuck, where do i apply the water material ???
July 7th, 2010 at 9:07 am
You’re the man!!! Thanks for sharing your knowledge and experience. I really like your work in general.
July 10th, 2010 at 2:39 pm
Actually your tutorial is very chaottic and a bit misleading with all those astronomial values you’re using. If someone is interested here is better one: http://www.cg-blog.com/index.php/2009/10/24/vray-caustics-tutorial.htm