Ametrine gem material (4.1)

[DriesV]

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I just added a ground plane, but left the material as the 'ground' type. I'll try it with a white diffuse plastic. Does the sample level for the material receiving the caustics matter much?
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Niels

The ground material as-is is great at catching caustics.
The sample level of the catch material doesn't influence the caustics much.

Dries

[NDenekamp]

Cant seems to find a good angle on this one to make pretty caustics show up.. This is like a step backward from my last try 

[DriesV]

Can you share the scene/KeyShot package?

Dries

[NDenekamp]

Dries, sure! This is an older version.. didn't hit save after the last render attempt as it wasn't really an improvement 

N

[DriesV]

Okay, I took your scene for a spin.
The attached images are what I came up with.

For the fist image I put very strong pin lights in an HDRI. The base HDRI was taken from the KeyShot library (outdoor). I put a tiny pin light over the sun and placed two more at various angles. You'd need KeyShot Pro for this though...

The second image demonstrates a very efficient approach to caustics. It involves putting one or more point lights in your scene to generate the caustics. The HDRI is only used for the general shading of the gem body at moderate brightness (0.6) and contrast. Using this method, caustics are rendered very, very fast. Another advantage is that you can don't need Pro to be able to do this.

Dries

[malayutou]

wow,so cool.thanks for sharing your experience.