playing with caustics

Post your tests, experiments and unfinished renderings here.
epilectrolytics
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The domino thing

Post by epilectrolytics »

With the Hybrid engine and SDS-cache LuxCore has passed two major milestones this year in caustics rendering and I was trying to complete an old project from last year with the new features, but though there is progress I’m still not getting anywhere. This animation shows three rounds each improving but not succeeding in the end.

Setting up a domino animation with bullet physics didn’t turn out well but somehow I like the chaotic mess and decided to proceed anyway.
The first render showed the big flaw of BiDir rendering: missing SDS-caustics, you can’t see the ground through a fallen domino. So it stopped right there.

Last weekend I gave it another try with the new engines, and it looked promising.
But choosing too small a lookup radius created unnecessary noise in the glass and OIDN cannot denoise glass when there is no proper refractive albedo, it creates artefacts then, and different ones each frame, adding to the merry flicker party from various other sources in the scene.

I learned by chance that SDS-cache does well with too big lookup radius, no grainy noise then!
So I did a third attempt without OIDN und despeckle node instead.
SDS now look much better but not yet calm, needs more samples because the infinite skylight is not sampled well and causes some unrest.

But, and this is great progress, caustic-wise stuff like this is now doing ok.

This turned my attention to another problem becoming apparent: sun reflections in glass bodies.
They just don’t work right in LuxCore.
When I take a glass body with smooth edges into the sunlight, there will be sun reflection highlights all over the place.
But in LuxCore with sun+sky system and default glass shader nothing much turns up as can be seen in the first BiDir part of the animation, the objects look dull instead of sparkling.
That could be improved with rough glass in theory, only it renders very slowly and with light tracing it causes a brightness issue. The last still image of the video shows an 1.5 hour (20000samples OCL) render with rough glass where the too bright caustics can be clearly seen. Also there are still many fireflies, clamping is no option as it would diminish the reflections I’m after, OIDN would do away with them but creates other artefacts in the glass instead, maybe dust & scratch filter in Photoshop could deal with them, did not try yet.

In the third run I used a mixture of 90% glass with 10% metal to get some reflections and then worked with despeckle and glare in the compositor. That went wrong because I adjusted the first frames and forgot to check with the end frames where the effect was way too strong.

And of course the constant wiggling from the nervous bullet physics doesn’t help either.

Though I didn’t succeed I wanted to give some feedback about the current state of animating caustics with LuxCore, I’m putting this back to rest now but am eagerly waiting for BiDirVM and Disney shader with transparency which were announced after the last poll but apparently postponed in the mean time, maybe they can help with the rough glass issues.
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domino3.blend.zip
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2020!

Post by epilectrolytics »

2020.jpg
2500 samples PathCPU Metro + Light tracing, 70% OIDN
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Re: playing with caustics

Post by epilectrolytics »

Comparison of render with caustic cache (first turn) versus light tracing with SDS-cache (second turn).

Caustics from cache seem too bright and there are fireflies dancing in the shadows that OIDN cannot catch, also render times are way longer.
Caustics from Hybrid engine seem more natural but brightness is not stable (flickering), render times are very short though.

Apparently there is currently no way to do proper caustics animations with LuxCore :(
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... and another rounded cube

Post by epilectrolytics »

I flooded my cellar and then found this.
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Re: playing with caustics

Post by B.Y.O.B. »

Beautiful :)
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more glass cubes

Post by epilectrolytics »

Testing v2.5 beta, 4 days rendering 250 frames but still not enough samples.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/s58ftd82rbgwe ... 3-.mov.zip
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default cube animation

Post by epilectrolytics »

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Re: Animated volumetric caustics!

Post by Spirit Wolf »

epilectrolytics wrote: Fri Dec 14, 2018 1:35 pm Wanted to do this for years, now it took me three days to render four seconds :lol:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nuvb4f6oakvuq6y/waves.mov
The render speed of the Ryzen octocore in my new PC is not as fast as I hoped for.
Maybe this is a Windows thing, like on Linux CPU rendering would be faster?
I think I read somewhere that rendering with Cycles on Win10 was slower than on Win7 or Linux.
And maybe the Spectre and Meltdown patches are slowing down things?
tried to render something like that but as a single pic... took me 24 hours.
true, it was seen through the water but yeah.
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Re: playing with caustics

Post by DionXein »

Here is little experiment with BiDir, Homogen Volume with different scatter asymmetry and directed spotlights. Around 360 samples and denoise
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Brill.png
Brill1.png
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tumbling cube

Post by epilectrolytics »

Animation with caustic light only.
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