How to make Easy Caustics in Blender! If you want to see more Blender related stuff: Current projects of mine: / bbbn192 Downloadable projects of mine: gumroad.com/bbbn19 #blender #shader
So fucking cool, this is like the best most realistic and awesome fake Cycles caustics I've seen so far, I wonder how come that your technique of achieving this effect did not become known and popular, this should have much more views, it's a cool effect many Blender artists probably don't know about.
supercool! an option would be to use '4D' Voronoi and animate 'W' value. setting it to 'F1 Smooth' gives you a 'Smoothness' parameter, which is nice for simulating deeper waters with less sharp caustics.
Fast way you can add some of that nice continuous dispersion just to the caustics in the compositor by checking emission in the view layers and then using it as a mix mask between the image with a few lens distortion nodes with projector on & dispersion set to 1, mixed with the base image. helps to multiply the emission pass a little in the compositor too. They are a little dull though, if anyone has any ideas to improve them lmk!
It would help if you showed how you set up the scene, as the cut, beveled cube (I'm assuming) you used as the background was stretched at the top for me and I couldn't work out how to stop this to make the sunlight-ripple effect look more natural and random. Other than that thanks for the great tutorial!
Hey dude. Your tutorials are amazing! Thank you for sharing your knowledge. If you use a Linear Light to mix in a 4D Noise Texture right before the Voronoi Texture and animate the W with the same driver as the Add Vector Math node, it adds some really nice, realistic distortion.
@@CartesianCaramel I definitely appreciate how you place a premium on efficiency. I also added in an AO node to remove the Voronoi from object close to the ground or each other. Looks great...assuming that's also super costly, computing-wise.
@@coleorloff No, not the AO, I meant the noise. I'm trying to get a more "realistic" distortion to the Voronoi (which looks passably good on its own, but I wanna go the extra mile), so it looks a little _more_ like water caustics.
That’s beautiful! I followed your tutorial and made the node. However , I made my shader (with many nodes including ambient occlusion, glossy etc) for my object with emission node before the material output. How can I apply your caustics nodes to my object? I tried to use mix shade to combine the my emission node and the principal bsdf (with emission strength linked to your caustic node). It work but my object Color changed. How can I retain my object Color while applying your caustics node? Thank you!
this is much cheaper than the light node setup, but still this will not give ray gods that can be created in that setup when we introduce the volumetrics. Great stuff for real time fake caustics!
Another great video! I guess there isn't a "raycast" shader node for the shader editor... because if there was you could use that to make sure the caustics don't appear underneath the cube or fish. I guess AO could work for that maybe...
Two things. How do you do it based off the light ? And would there be way to have some slight effect on the bottom to be faking reflective caustics too since it technically would have that and so it based off the distance from the floor
Any way to make this material transparent so that the effect can be applied, for example, to a rocky river bottom? I tried setting all color value alphas accordingly, but it never seemed to work.
Cool! One question regarding your tutorials: you never seem to use the 4d noise and simply animate the w value for animating the texture. Is there any particular reason for that? Is it more expansive or does animating the position cause some better results? Thank you!
Do memorize Ctrl-J as the 'J'oin selected nodes in a frame shortcut. Less effort. And its standard - not Node Wrangler. So no confusion for viewers....
Did you know that you can add nodes to lights? (cycles, no clue if it works in eevee) You can use it to fake the caustics in the light so it handles the bottom itself and shadows from objects will also be correct. Seen this light nodes in several tutorials, here's one if you want to check. th-cam.com/video/X9YmJ0zGWHw/w-d-xo.html
![fellow fellow - Proud [OFFICIAL MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/9uZF7BlUQPE/mqdefault.jpg)
If you would like the full procedural fish Blender file, it is up on my Gumroad page: bbbn19.gumroad.com/l/udlwo
Thanks for this helpful tutorial! Understanding ways to use nodes is forever going to be a thing I keep learning about.
Dude you are absolutely KILLING it!
Awesome tut! and that custom falloff trick is GEM!
This is awesome! Thanks for putting this together man. Really well explained. Keep up the great work!
Bless you everyday, thankyou once again for the tutorials, your explanation on how the nodes works it's really good.
bro i just looked at your gumroad and you are an amazing person, all those projects look so cool
Oh my gosh thank you! I've been trying to work out how to do this on stylised/ NPR project and I think I can totally apply this!
This is seriously awesome! Gonna try this out soon!
Today I passed your tutorial & after that, look result in VR. Awesome deep effect! Thanks so much for interesting tutorials!
Great little tutorial! Easy to implement and super effective, thanks.
Amazing results with ease. Thanks !
your tutorials are really great thank you. i just learned something super valuable!
I've been following you on twitter for a long time, very grateful that you finally made a youtube channel :D
amazing tutorial! works like a charm!
This is awesome! great tutorials
Great trick! Adding an RGB input node in the group and connecting it to an output would save you from manually setting the color each time too.
Great tutorial. Thanks for sharing.
Just BRILLIANT! Thank you! Dg
Very nice! Thanks for sharing!
Beautiful 😍 nice job
So fucking cool, this is like the best most realistic and awesome fake Cycles caustics I've seen so far, I wonder how come that your technique of achieving this effect did not become known and popular, this should have much more views, it's a cool effect many Blender artists probably don't know about.
+💯 for the logarithm trick on the Voronoi falloff. I tried lots of methods, but none worked as well as yours!
supercool! an option would be to use '4D' Voronoi and animate 'W' value. setting it to 'F1 Smooth' gives you a 'Smoothness' parameter, which is nice for simulating deeper waters with less sharp caustics.
Fast way you can add some of that nice continuous dispersion just to the caustics in the compositor by checking emission in the view layers and then using it as a mix mask between the image with a few lens distortion nodes with projector on & dispersion set to 1, mixed with the base image. helps to multiply the emission pass a little in the compositor too. They are a little dull though, if anyone has any ideas to improve them lmk!
Thanks this is great!
Thats fish movement is beautiful
very smart done! :)
By far the best fake caustics i've seen. Thanks so much.
Nice work man ty
Genius! Tks for sharing;)
amazing
Awsome I did it wow
It would help if you showed how you set up the scene, as the cut, beveled cube (I'm assuming) you used as the background was stretched at the top for me and I couldn't work out how to stop this to make the sunlight-ripple effect look more natural and random. Other than that thanks for the great tutorial!
Hey dude. Your tutorials are amazing! Thank you for sharing your knowledge.
If you use a Linear Light to mix in a 4D Noise Texture right before the Voronoi Texture and animate the W with the same driver as the Add Vector Math node, it adds some really nice, realistic distortion.
That does work, but it is extremely expensive.
@@CartesianCaramel I definitely appreciate how you place a premium on efficiency.
I also added in an AO node to remove the Voronoi from object close to the ground or each other. Looks great...assuming that's also super costly, computing-wise.
Is this color mixing the two, or are you sending it into the Voronoi texture itself, like in the vector input or something?
I forget what I did exactly. But I was probably using the AO node to mask out the Voronoi caustics pattern. @@LeumeisterVeritas
@@coleorloff No, not the AO, I meant the noise. I'm trying to get a more "realistic" distortion to the Voronoi (which looks passably good on its own, but I wanna go the extra mile), so it looks a little _more_ like water caustics.
goat
I prefer using this sort same method on lights and also separate the RGB so we can soft color offset
That’s beautiful! I followed your tutorial and made the node. However , I made my shader (with many nodes including ambient occlusion, glossy etc) for my object with emission node before the material output. How can I apply your caustics nodes to my object? I tried to use mix shade to combine the my emission node and the principal bsdf (with emission strength linked to your caustic node). It work but my object Color changed. How can I retain my object Color while applying your caustics node? Thank you!
this is much cheaper than the light node setup, but still this will not give ray gods that can be created in that setup when we introduce the volumetrics. Great stuff for real time fake caustics!
Another great video! I guess there isn't a "raycast" shader node for the shader editor... because if there was you could use that to make sure the caustics don't appear underneath the cube or fish. I guess AO could work for that maybe...
Technically there is a way using the shader to RGB node as a mask, but it is very inconsistent.
cool! I tried it
You genius
nice
Two things. How do you do it based off the light ? And would there be way to have some slight effect on the bottom to be faking reflective caustics too since it technically would have that and so it based off the distance from the floor
Thank you for the tutorial. Easy only thanks to your smarts.
PLEASE MAKE THE FISH TUTORIAL 😭😭😭
Any way to make this material transparent so that the effect can be applied, for example, to a rocky river bottom? I tried setting all color value alphas accordingly, but it never seemed to work.
You can use a vertex group to specify where the caustics should be
Cool! One question regarding your tutorials: you never seem to use the 4d noise and simply animate the w value for animating the texture. Is there any particular reason for that? Is it more expansive or does animating the position cause some better results? Thank you!
I don't use 4D textures mainly because it is very expensive, and the stretching caused by this method is a tad more accurate to real caustics.
wow
hey, the result is not the same for me. what is the BSDF connected to ? please.
great work
Node wizard strikes again
Damn, that's cool
Hello! I Downloaded this project and I wanna change ehis color blue. How can I change it?
Do memorize Ctrl-J as the 'J'oin selected nodes in a frame shortcut. Less effort. And its standard - not Node Wrangler. So no confusion for viewers....
I wanna buy fish object, but there is some kind of page error issue! could u fix it?
DO THE FISH
Show what keys your hitting next time
Is It possible to loop these caustics?
Where I'm i suppost to get the fish modell
Make one of course. It is blender after all.
anyone know how to do it in clarisse?
Did you know that you can add nodes to lights? (cycles, no clue if it works in eevee)
You can use it to fake the caustics in the light so it handles the bottom itself and shadows from objects will also be correct.
Seen this light nodes in several tutorials, here's one if you want to check.
th-cam.com/video/X9YmJ0zGWHw/w-d-xo.html
No nodes for eevee sadly. You can't map textured to them but you can mask them with a flag made from geometry or texture set to Alpha hashed
Hmmm, I wonder how you could get a shadow map from occlusions above the caustic surface? So that the cube or fish don't gather a caustic beneath them
how is your evee render scene looks this nice?
#frame/12 isn't working in my blender
same. wondering if theres a new syntax now?
oh wait try deleting the hashtag!
alsom