Carrara Challenge #26: “Caustics and Nautical”

Diomede

Aha!  Here is a second test.  This time I set the diffuse color of the gems to "none" but enabled subsurface scattering and added a color tint there.  I removed the color reference from the transprency channel and replaced it with a numeric value.  Translucency is set to 10%.  Here are results with and without caustics.  This time you can see the caustic effect of scattered light on the tablecloth under the gems.

 

Shlomi, I recommend checking your shader settings for your objects. 

 

wgdjohn

diomede, Thanks for the examples. Your polylines are just what I needed to steer me in a much better direction that I was headed next. I'd watched Cripeman's video awile back so just viewed it again and glad I did... that is just one of all his very good tutorials.

TangoAlpha

So I took a scene with a lot of glasses, bottles, liquids etc, and applied caustics. It seemed to find an extra light from somewhere (there's only two lights in the scene: above and way off to the right. The extra light doesn't appear to come from either of those places). But otherwise, it had zero effect.

Obviously there's something else required...

 

shlomi laszlo

did some test renders:

low rez, fest AA.

changed shaders.

turns out:

you need reflection and\or refraction to make caustics.

you need diffuse aka color to catch caustics.

 

Mistara

first part of WIP is the inspiration 

MarkIsSleepy

TangoAlpha said:

So I took a scene with a lot of glasses, bottles, liquids etc, and applied caustics. It seemed to find an extra light from somewhere (there's only two lights in the scene: above and way off to the right. The extra light doesn't appear to come from either of those places). But otherwise, it had zero effect.

Obviously there's something else required...

 

I don't think the caustics observes any kind of conservation of energy; you can see in your second image that it really improved some of the bottles, but it turneda couple of them into light emitters.  I had this same problem when I lasy played with it.  It's VERY sensitive to the scale of the objects too in my experience - if someone is not noticing an effect, try scaling things way up or way down and see what happens. :)

 

Diomede

 

MistyMist said:

first part of WIP is the inspiration 

 

 

chickenman

Here is something I did while playing with Caustics tonight

the Caustic Light from the Sphere hits the cube and lights it up.

Sphere is set as crystal and the cubeis diamond.

 

 

 

wgdjohn

Both are Very good looking.

shlomi laszlo

changed shaders to some of the objects:

lower transparency, higher value in color (slider 1-100%).

got aome lovely pastel colors on those objects.

 

 

DustRider

I don't know if I'll have time to enter anything, but here is a quick example of cuastics using the Octane Render plugin.

Diomede

Very nice!

 

DustRider said:

I don't know if I'll have time to enter anything, but here is a quick example of cuastics using the Octane Render plugin.

 

 

MarkIsSleepy

I spent most of my weekend working on entries for a couple Blender contests (I posted one of them in my gallery here too, if anyone is curious http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/169996/) but I did manage to block out my initial idea for this challenge too. :)

Nothing here is the final, I just usually start out by blocking in my key elements and trying to pick a good starting camera angle and a basic idea of where my lighting will be coming from.  

Standing in for what will eventually be a shipwrecked pirate lass is Loretta LoRez on a raft made of simple cylinder primitives.  The ship here is just something from the Carrara content library but I'm going to try and model a flying fantasy-steampunk airship coming to the rescue.  Obviously the infinite plane will be replaced with something more like an actual ocean as well (any excuse to break out PhilW's Carrara Seas :) ).

I may need to widen the image a bit too - I don't like how the raft mast is intersecting the airship, plus I think showing a more wide open expanse of sea might add to the idea that she's all alone out there.

 

Diomede

Circling sharks.  Excellent.  One of my favorite features of the Carrara challenges compared to others is that we get to see into the creative mind of people like you, MDO2010.  Another great entry in the making.  Thanks for sharing your concept sketch.  If I could make one suggestion it would be to include an item of interest on the raft.  Did she manage to salvage a small treasure chest from the wreckage?  Or maybe a pistol or a sabre?  Treasure map fixed to the raft by a dagger - with X marking the spot?   Or maybe a parrot on the mast?  Something associated wth pirates.

Headwax

quick and dirty, after wikipedia scan showing caustics can also be reflection

this has three lights set to only light up the ball - the ball's reflections via caustics light up mr badly posed lo res

 

 

Mistara

mirrors are considered caustics?

been wanting to do render experiments with mirrors.

chickenman

See this definition from Wikipedia. It even discusses shortly the computer Caustics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caustic_(optics)

 

wgdjohn

just read it. It could'nt find the page right away since the right brace is not part of the link. No big deal Wikipedia suggests the correct page.

MarkIsSleepy

head wax said:

quick and dirty, after wikipedia scan showing caustics can also be reflection

this has three lights set to only light up the ball - the ball's reflections via caustics light up mr badly posed lo res

 

That is very cool - I didn't know caustics could do that.  Time to go play! :)

Headwax

a fortunate discovery!! if you get a chance have a look at this page http://andrewfinnie.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/schwarm-of-eschers.html

from memory there is one light source, I made all the walls reflective so they bounce the light around, bump is handy too

 

same with the images at the bottom of this page http://andrewfinnie.com/p/pinocchio.html

 

to quote wiki In optics, a caustic or caustic network [1] is the envelope of light rays reflected or refracted by a curved surface or object, or the projection of that envelope of rays on another surface.[2] The caustic is a curve or surface to which each of the light rays is tangent, defining a boundary of an envelope of rays as a curve of concentrated light.[2] Therefore, in the image to the right, the caustics can be the patches of light or their bright edges. 

wgdjohn

I've spent this evening/night working on caustics and tweaking a new "charcoal" color shader for an idea that I had. Unfortunately it didn't work out just yet so I've nothing that I want to see without modifications and trying a different approach along with tweaking the shader to be more reflective. Now I have an entirely different idea and hope to get started on it very soon... thanks go to *head wax* for the inspiration... everyone has some very good example WIPs.

Oh my boat... I do plan to make one... thinking of either a semi-modern canoe or a flat bottom fishing boat. I seem to be modeling too many ideas at the same time which make me a bit dizzier than normal. :)  I just need to pick a direction and go with that alone.

chickenman

The PC+ club freebies could  come in handy for the caustics part of the challenge.

http://www.daz3d.com/platinum-club-freebies

wgdjohn

Thanks... I grabbed them awhile ago... still need to shut down Carrara and crank up DIM. Even though I was thinking about creating my own object in the vertex room.

Headwax

chickenman said:

The PC+ club freebies could  come in handy for the caustics part of the challenge.

http://www.daz3d.com/platinum-club-freebies

thanks ;)

 

 

Headwax

. thanks go to *head wax* for the inspiration... 

pleasure, it's good to be part of this community

Headwax

same scene with a lot more ... balls

one bulb is set to light only the balls

one image (the cleaner one) is max photon count and max filter, other image is max photon count and 10 percent filter

I like the dirty one

 

wgdjohn

I must agree... the dirty one has more character than the other.

MarkIsSleepy

Had a little time to work on my image today: 

• Replaced the infinite plane with one of PhilW's Carrara Seas and dropped in some of his clouds for good measure.
• Adjusted the framing and image proportions.
• Added in some sharks. They're a little hard to see at this resolution, but when I did a partial test at full size they were visible.
• Modeled a raft to replace the all-primitives stand-in.
• Added something on the raft to fill in the blank space - this is probably not what will be there in the final image, just wanted to see how it affected the flow of the image.  The Luggage as modeled by me in Blender for another project so I just brought over the un-rigged version to try it out and thought I'd plop it on the raft for fun.  The Blender render I used it in is in my DAZ gallery if you want to see what it looks like at better size and with some of the legs posed.
• Removed part of the stand-in character lighting I had, which seems to have resulted in not having any lights on the main character.

Next up:

• Replace the character with a G2F and go through all my old V4 outfits to find some good pirate and steam punk stuff.
• Figure out if I want to keep The Luggage or put something else there (I was thinking maybe a second character, passed out/dead).
• Get to work on modeling the ship so I can take out the stand-in - I found some super high resolution reference images for an old two masted "age of sail" ship that I really like.
• Figure out the character lighting - I really like the strong back-light, but need to see what pose and outfit the character end up in before I decide if that's enough or if there are details I want to bring out more.

I particularly like how the Carrara Dynamic Hairs I added to the ropes looks - I'm starting to use this technique a lot on everything from rope to clothing to add a look of loose threads and really liking how much it adds to a lot images. Just a thousand or so fairly thick, short hairs with a bit of frizz and clump on them really makes the static model look like fraying ropes IMO.

wgdjohn

Great idea using hair for the rope... looks more realistic. I'd chuck the luggage or it's legs, never seen a chest with legs like that... they are a bit distracting. I do see a few things missing... a method to fish, something for fresh water to drink and at least a knife... all for survival of course. Back on the chest it nees some method of being tethered securly else first good sized wave will wash it away. Just my opinions. BTW I think there are at least 4 or 5 sharks... wouldn't have seen any had you not pointed them out.

MarkIsSleepy

The Luggage is something from Terry Pratchett's Discwork novels http://discworld.wikia.com/wiki/The_Luggage.  It's just a placeholder, not something I am keeping in the image.  As for all the other stuff - I've only worked on the image for a grand total of about an hour so far - it's nowhere near finished, I aam mostly just testing adding and subtracting things and testing out the basic composition at this point.

I'm actually surprised you can see the sharks - I know exactly where they are andI can't see them in the low-res test render.