lacilaci wrote: ↑Tue Aug 06, 2019 12:13 pm
Sure, this is the scene I'm testing all the possibilities in:
poolCaustics_testscene.blend
Thanks!
Sadly I'm not able to get any better results
First I tried PathCPU+Metro (no PGI). In order to speed up things, I reduced path depth, set relative sun size to 4, roughness of glossy materials to 0.19 and added light tracing with glossiness threshold 0.2, hoping that would take care of the noise above the water.
Also I changed the water bump from procedural to image texture which is faster.
But then the whole thing took 2h50min for 10000 samples and still very noisy (OIDN at 70%):
Than I tested the caustic cache (without indirect because it influences caustic in a bad way) and could not get rid of the issues either.
I didn't like the straight water surface edges and replaced the flat plane with a wavy plane (no speed difference, but waves should have been smaller).
With PathOCL+PGI there is the problem that the periods of newly built caches increase with time, so there is no equal sampling ratio and not enough cache instances in the end.
Switching to PathCPU+PGI things are slow but steady, but firefllies take too long to disappear and some are very strong and don't disappear at all.
Also there are some dark artefacts in the underwater caustics and the shadows appear too dark.
Result after 1000 samples in 25min:
In the end there is no satisfying result.
Path+Metro kinda works but a 4k render might take 12h to finish which is not feasible if more than one of those are requested.
(I used sky background because I like it better than the grey color, especially in reflections.)