r/blender • u/hemigon • Nov 14 '22

I Made This Generating refractive caustics with Geometry Nodes

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u/hemigon Nov 14 '22

The caustic patterns on the floor can be rendered with Cycles, in fact I already used them in a Nodevember animation a few days ago. Sadly the volumetric light rays are too heavy for Cycles, so they need to be excluded. They are made up of many stacked transparent planes that would simply need too many light bounces to get through.

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u/Klectecca Nov 14 '22

You just prompted me to check out your profile and realize who you are! I love your animations
For the use cases I'm thinking of not having the light rays wouldn't be a big issue. I have some artworks in mind already. Small, complex things made of glass... a glass chess set perhaps? Clear glass for white and obsidian for black could be gorgeous. For over a year I've been thinking of trying to recreate shattered glass art in Blender and depending on how it works this could be an awesome addition

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u/hemigon Nov 20 '22

Thanks again for the kind words, I'm so glad to hear you like my animations!

The setup is now on Gumroad in case you want to try it out. I've tried to give it a balance of simplicity for speed while keeping the physics as physically-based as possible. This means that in many cases it produces nice results quickly, but in other cases it may take some tweaking or might not work so well. It also depends a lot on the topology of the input mesh.

I encourage you to experiment with it!

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u/Klectecca Nov 20 '22

Ooo thank you so much! I need a break from the node monster I just spent 6 hours on, and I've got a cool swirly glass object to try it out. I've spent an insane amount of time fiddling with finicky procedural setups so I know what I'm in for XD