Caustics

Video captions: Open the Scenegraph via the Quick Access Bar and pull up the Scenegraph menu with the help of the right mouse button menu. Create a material group. Subordinate it, via drag and drop, to your geometry. If necessary, open the Material Editor and create a new glass material. Change the exterior transparency of the material to a bluish color tone. As the refraction index, set a value of 1.2 and activate Solid Shadows. Assign the material, via drag and drop, to the material group. Create another material. This time, select a plastic material. Change the Diffuse Color to a darker color tone and give Roughness a value of 2. Assign the material to your floor plane. Select your environment HDR in the Material Editor, and in the color Correction section, set the exposure value to 0 to deactivate the HDR lighting in your scene. This is done for demonstration purposes to make caustics visible in our scene. Call upon, if necessary, the Light Editor in the Scene menu. Activate the light source that was set up in advance by selecting Enabled. To generate a new light source, select the plus symbol in the Light Editor and choose a type of light. Open the Render Settings, via the Quick Access Bar, and in the Raytracing Quality tab, open Illumination Mode to get to its settings. To get caustics to be displayed, Full Global Illumination is necessary as render mode. Expand the Photon Tracing section and choose, under Mode, Caustics + Indirect to activate photon tracing with caustics. Via Interactive Count, the number of expelled photons can be set. This parameter refers to the interactive rendering. Change the value to 500 000 to radiate this many photons. Move your geometry to make the created caustics recognizable on your floor plane. Raise the number of photons as you please to increase the display of the created caustics. For performance reasons, the number of photons is being reduced again. Select your light source with the help of the Scenegraph and move it as you please in your render view. Changes in the caustics through moving the light source are displayed interactively. Increase the intensity of the light source. Open the Render Settings and increase the photon count for interactive and still to one million. Stillframe Count defines the amount of photon used for the image computation process. Activate the antialiasing.