Silverwing Quick Tip: Understanding Caustics (Or why caustics are so hard to render)

This tut is made with Octane Version 2022.1_R5 and Cinema 4D Version 2023.1

Hello everyone.
This week a Day early as I am invited to a birthday Party tomorrow yay.
Its a very theoretical video this week as it lets you peek behind the inner workings of a renderer and tries to answer the question of why Caustics are so darn hart to render in most of todays render engines.

P.s. leave a comment if you have any good Idea for a future quick tip / tut.

0:00 Intro
1:00 Establishing the Baseline
1:58 What Light is doing in Reality
3:14 The CGI Process
5:46 Caustics in Reality
6:17 Caustics in CGI
8:00 What happens with "Fake Shadows"
9:11 Looking at Photon Caustics
10:24 Examples in 3D
11:27 Explaining "Caustic Blur"
13:40 Photon Tracer "Photon Gathering Radius"
15:45 Outro

[ThePuka]

Otoy owes you. You continue to educate on a fairly deep level about the use cases of octane features. Ideally I would have always liked video materials on each feature of octane that was called up inside the app. The manual is ok but often you need to know why you use a feature at all. Something like Jake In Motions amazing AE breakdown of every effect would help octane users so much. I hadn’t considered how the caustics were calculated, glad to understand now. Be interesting to see how this develops with the brigade transition.

[proceduralnodesd]

Great tutorial!! You really explained why there is an issue and how the photon kernel helps remedy it.

[vladolareanu]

Exactly what I needed now! Thank you :)

[zotake]

I was waiting it! You are killing with those Quick Tips! Thanks again for sharing it.

[amisheetrit]

Raphael, as always you keep things interesting by explaining how its actually works in real life+cgi. Thank you so much for your time & effort! this Tutorial is amazing

[MGrilloD]

Just what I need to see, thanks for making Sir!!!

[ThomvanVliet]

Always learn something new, even going in to this video thinking I won't need caustics information I still learned about fake shadows and caustic blur, incredible!

[alexp]

Brilliant stuff, really good info thanks

[bulba]

big brain explanation. another banger bro <3

[impylse]

Wow! always wondered how fake shadows and caustic blur worked... thank you Raphael!

[afewhourslater_dion]

sooo great lecture. You did amazing thing

[goner]

Everytime you add another piece to my knowledge :D

[jj]

Oh mannnn, vielen Dank! Ich lern so viel durch dich *_* <3

[darkworx-films]

I like your tutorials very much. I always watch them during my break on monday. I am also interested in another fusion tutorial regarding multipasses and how to combine them from the ground up. Thus Aces with a model with more layers to it, dif dir/ind refl dir/ind etc etc, the way to combine them exactly is something interesting to me and perhaps you would love to elaborate on that as well:D keep up the good work!!!

[DIRK_H.]

very good explanation, thanks a lot!!!🙂🙂🙂

[alokitpathik]

excellent so happy from OTOY for this update can we have complete scene tutorials like using this photon update on a perfume bottle !!

[gvzdyshk]

Thank you so much! I'm amazed by your tutorials/researches. Last time I asked you about intersecting and overlapping volume objects, I want to add to the list of questions the topic of noises, especially in dark scenes. Sometimes it's impossible in octane to render without noise no matter how many samples do you use, how it is? I'm a corona user as well and rendering one picture for 8 hrs I'm sure that it will have no noise at all, but in octane 16000 passes with all maximum values I have no guarantee that it will be clean - that is so embarrassing and annoying

[johnford]

do you ever use the photon tracer on larger scenes like a swimming pool? I am finding they work quite well on smaller scenes but for archviz work they work, but have issues - lots of black squares that many times to not resolve.

[vinicimmm]

nossa, muito obrigado, esse vídeo é uma verdadeira aula.

[Amorstopineed]

Hello raphael, its very intersting, i really want to make such interesting casutic scenes - but not sure which render works better- redshift or octane, you prefer octane to redshift regarding this difficult, detailled scenes?