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Do you remember how easy is Caustic setup? I talked about in this post: V-Ray caustics in the pool.

With exterior pool is easy getting nice caustics because we have a strong and focused light: the sun. How to achive a similar result using a diffuse light like V-Ray light?

It’s really hard. V-Ray light shoots photons everywhere (at 180°) so we need a looot of subdivisions to get a valuable result.

Lots of subdivisions means lots of time: 20.000 subdivisions need around 10mins to render this simple scene (left image). But there’s a trick to render this scene in few seconds!

Free sample Premium content.

Split light and caustics in 2 different sources:

• a V-Ray light for normal lighting
• a standard Spot Light just for caustics

The spot light is perfect to focus caustics in a specific area. Above you can see the image on the right, rendered in only 13 seconds. It’s pretty the same way that Ricardo Eloy in this tutorial, I just changed some little thing and did it in few minutes.

Of course this is a sort of fake solution, because diffuse lights can’t produce strongs caustics. Anyway this method can help us to get a really nice effect.

Watch the video, download the file below and complete the exercise!

VIDEO :

VIDEO-SUMMARY :

1. Disable caustics for V-Ray light
2. Add spot light (multipl. 1.000.000) and exclude everything
   ( Make V-Ray light invisible if the spot is behind it )
3. Enable caustics
4. Clic render and wait few seconds 🙂

EXERCISE :

Now, download this file and repeat the exercise.
For any doubts check the “FINAL” version file.

Enjoy it.

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