I have a scene that I thought by turning on caustics it might add some realism with a few extra random light bounces or glints. I know typically you use caustics when rendering a glass of water or something but thought it might do something here. But pretty much the caustics just added random snow bits to my render. I let this render over night for 8 hours with 32 samples for the both the global illumination bounces and ray bounces. Is there something I should do different or is this just not going to work in my situation at all?
So, I guess no one knows how to use caustics?
This is not always interesting to set caustics on, in your case I am not sure that is mandatory, but you can try to increase samples to avoid fireflie or try to adjust lights/ decrease light and avoid pure white.
Caustics works better with physical lights.
Perhaps if you shared your lighting setup, render mode (max time/samples or custom) and what sort of lights are illuminating the scene someone could better help you out. Usually if the fireflies don't start going away quickly, more samples won't help. I would also try searching the forum for "fireflies" because there could be some threads that would be useful to you.
Caustics isn't going to do much for your scene I'm afraid, the only thing it would be affecting is the light traveling through the water droplets, and that is such a small percentage it might not be worth it.
Thanks for all the insight. Will read up more.