Re:Path Tracing Quake in Blender
by ahefner on Monday June 21, 2021 @12:30PM
(#27580773)
I'd love to see if the fake water surface texture could be replaced with a procedural deformation faking waves so that the path tracing could render caustics.
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Unfortunately, Blender not very good at caustics. In theory, any path tracer can do them, but in practice, the sampling needs to prioritize caustic-generating regions to be even remotely efficient.
There might be add-ons that help, but vanilla Cycles will take orders of magnitude more samples to create a good image when there's caustics involved than when there's not. For that reason, it's still common to fake caustics in Blender using a texture or projection effect.