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DXBigD — Glass - VRay Caustics Test
Published: 2007-03-07 00:18:35 +0000 UTC; Views: 26201; Favourites: 37; Downloads: 48814
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Description
VRay Caustics Test. Took a few minutes to render. I wanted to compare it to the Mental Ray caustics. I noticed that for quick renders, Mental Ray's better, since it takes a few seconds to render this at a lower res with lower quality caustics, but at a higher quality, it looks a little worse than with VRay.(VRay refractive material + caustics + 1 light with area shadows)
Made in 3DS Max.
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Comments: 45
Thanks. It's such an old piece of work with low quality settings yet it got tons of downloads cause it shows up on Google, lol. Weird.
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Mmm, tasty looking caustics you have there...
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Lol, I have no idea how that works. Wouldn't they have to first view it in order to click "download"? Weird.
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That looks great. What program did you use for modeling?
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3D Studio Max. It was a very simple model. I just did a lathe on a spline then extruded some polygons to add some detail to the caustics.
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Wow, I'll have to try Vray sometime, or whatever it was called. You did the whole thing fairly awsome.
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Thank you. The renderer's really the main thing that adds realism to renderings. Even simple models can look good with the right materials and lighting.
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Wow. Thanks, I'll have to take that advice, if I return to realisim.
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Wowaweewah! Thank you very much.
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maybe a bit too much refraction but its very good !
i never get glass right :[
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This looks great even if it was a test 
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I just used 2000 samples/rays for the VRay caustics effect in the VRay properties on my directional light. The light also casts area shadows (vray shadow -> check "area" in the shadow properties). You could also just use a VRay light to get nice area shadows, but that's also much slower when rendering.
The glass was a simple VRay material with a fresnel map for the refraction. I used a bit of a curve for the fresnel mix instead of the straight linear one (from the lower-left to the top-right value). I made most of the object be transparent except where it's thick at the edges.
That's about it, really. I used Adaptive AA with settings of -1 to 3 samples or around that much. It's really a simple image.
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Cool! And Thank You for showing that.
I always DIG getting info on that! Smart comparison, I think I'll go with Mental Ray for renders like this 
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You can stick to MentalRay since it comes with Max and it can do just about anything VRay can, but MentalRay's anti-aliasing is just plain ugly, even at crazy values like 64 samples, which makes it very slow. VRay has adaptive AA which looks better and is much faster and most importantly the VRay displacements are very accurate and much, much faster than in MentalRay, so it has its uses.
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Thank You! That is Great info, and I appreciate it! 
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No you're insane!
Btw everyone, : P is now a sad face for some reason.
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Well, I knew that, but this is insane in a GOOD way!
I'm a sucker for caustics.
Let see..
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Weird, it works now. 
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looks real, except the glass has some weird shadows in it....
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Yeah, I think the geometry's a little bad and caused some of that...and there's that dark part in the middle which is somehow the refracted black in the background. I don't know, it looks a little weird but then again it's just a little test.
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it's probably due to the absolute blackness of the environment. Try setting the beauty up with some GI or an HDRI
Funky geometry will.. unfortunately also screw up shadows.
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Yeah, I love the realistic lighting with GI, and I was testing it out but using that and caustics (2000 samples) was just way too slow. I love testing things and seeing the results right away, that's why I mostly stick with low poly stuff, hehe.
Later on I'm gonna use GI with some environment image for my final renderings.
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Thanks. This was a quick model I made just for testing (spline + lathe), but I'm gonna make some realistic objects too and see how those look.
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