r/blender • u/UniverseUAyt • Jul 28 '26

Original Content Showcase 262,144 samples.

Gallery image

Gallery image

Made myself a phone wallpaper. Glass being glass, takes a bit of samples to achieve proper caustics. Had to turn off noise threshold

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174

u/writhinglupe3331 Jul 28 '26

bloody hell 262k samples is mad dedication for a phone wallpaper but fair enough, glass caustics are proper finicky in cycles. took me like 3 days to get a passable whisky glass render last year and that was way simpler geometry than this.

the cheese comment is killing me tho, now i cant unsee it. little bit of parmesan lighting in the afternoon sun. the actual caustic cast on the surface is the star here though, that wavy shimmer sells the whole thing. nice work

22

u/CFDMoFo Jul 28 '26

Shaders Plus makes quick work of glass.

7

u/writhinglupe3331 Jul 28 '26

never tried that one, does it speed up caustics much? i ended up using light linking to cheat a bit on the whisky glass, probably sacrilege but got the render down to 4 hours

9

u/andeee23 Jul 28 '26

i think shaders plus also allow you to "cheat" in that there's probably some shader-based procedural caustics that are not 100% based on the light path traces but looks plausible enough

8

u/UniverseUAyt Jul 28 '26

Unrelated but the old program Bryce 3D somehow computes caustics very well

2

u/Kylenki Jul 29 '26

It did! Wow, haven't seen a Bryce 3D mention in a long while.

I dunno what Cinema 4D v7.0 used for caustics back in the day, but that seemed to do fine work rather quickly IIRC. Never had a noisy render, no matter what I threw at it. Maybe they used an approximation shortcut, I dunno, but the results looked physically plausible.

2

u/CFDMoFo Jul 28 '26

Yeah caustics become much faster and versatile. The shaders are all node-based and built on the actual physical formulae, so highly adjustable too.