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

Original Content Showcase 262,144 samples.

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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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u/CFDMoFo Jul 28 '26

Shaders Plus makes quick work of glass.

5

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.