KeyShot 4.1 Beta - Caustics tests

[DriesV]

A waterfall of light.

Dries

[DriesV]

Less wasted light on this waterfall.

Dries

[guest84672]

Very cool!

[DriesV]

Same general set-up, but with dispersion on the primary large prism.

Dries

[guest84672]

Sweeeet!

[DriesV]

I just did these.
No dispersion this time. I used colored mirrors/prisms to create the colored light patterns. I put the 'catch' plane at a very low angle. That way, each light beam's intensity is distributed more evenly across the catch plane. This eliminated the very bright hot spots I was getting with the beams hitting the plane perpendicularly.
The second image has gotten a vintage treatment.

This is a single-shot KeyShot render.
No compositing, no postwork, except for some minor curve and color adjustments in Photoshop.

Dries

[KeyShot]

Wow Dries. Just simply amazing!

[DriesV]

Wow Dries. Just simply amazing!

Glad you like it, Henrik!
Thank you for the awesome caustics implementation.

Dries

[Speedster]

These are so amazing!  They beg the question- what would happen during a simple (or complex) animation?  Like just a camera orbit.  Could be mind-blowing, not to mention CPU busting!
Bill G

[DriesV]

Hmm, you got me thinking, Bill.
A rotation animation on the primary large prism would indeed look really good. I'm curious myself to see how the light pattern on the 'catch' plane would evolve.

These scenes do render quite quickly for what they are (32 ray bounces, many caustics due to many reflections/refractions). The caustics' quality improves gradually (sharper, less noise) as you let it sit (which is a huge benefit!), but it still takes +1 hour render times on a 32 core machine to get really sharp caustics at 1000x1000 px. Of course less complex scenes render much faster.

So if anyone's out there with a 256 core network rendering set-up with some idle time, I'll happily share my scene for an animation render job.

Dries

[Speedster]

Maybe just a test with a tiny 250 x 250 x 30 degrees 10 second orbit?  Just for kicks?  oddly, you can almost guess what it would look like.
Bill G

[DriesV]

Maybe just a test with a tiny 250 x 250 x 30 degrees 10 second orbit?  Just for kicks?  oddly, you can almost guess what it would look like.
Bill G

Bill, I just HAD to try making an animation. I am rendering on a 6-core machine as I type this.
It's going to be a 360 degree 'ease in/ease out' 10 seconds rotation animation on the primary prism.
Rendering in advanced mode is big speedup when you have lots of sharp caustics in your scene.
I'm rendering 250 frames with the following settings:

• 850 x 850 pixels
• 64 samples
• 32 ray bounces
• antialias quality 4
• global illumination quality 2
• caustics quality 100

1 frame takes 6 minutes to complete on a single Xeon E5-1650 machine.
So the job should be finished by tomorrow noon.

Dries

[Josh3D]

This... Dries. my goodness man. very, very cool!!!

[evilmaul]

very cool stuff indeed!!!

[danrod3d]

Tutorial even!! very cool stuff