Saul Espinosa
patreon
Patreon Tutorial #54 - New Caustics and Custom Toon Tone Tonemapping - Part 1
🕑 Added 2024-09-04 17:57:32 +0000 UTCHey guys, in part 1 of Patreon Tutorial #54, I go over the new Caustics features. There was a total overhaul to the Caustics UI, making it easier than ever to work with caustics in your scenes.
Whether you want to use global caustics in a single click or override different aspects globally. You can even go back to using them in a fully manual assignment way if needed, this gives users the best of both worlds, ease of use, and maximum control to art direct them.
I will also go over the new Brute Force Caustics technique and how it differs from the previous Photon Mapping technique. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, and I explain how to get the most out of your Brute Force Caustics. In the end, this video covers all the new parameters, and how each of them functions concerning the scene's objects, lights, and shaders.
Project Files are Linked Below, but it might be best to wait until the build is released so the UI gets updated and functions correctly. Thanks again guys for all the support, and have a wonderful week!
Comments
John Yim
Awesome, looking forward to it!
Saul Espinosa
Hey John, I can make one. but things are a bit trickier once you involve multiple machines. The setup is a bit confusing though and indeed there is very little information in terms of resources. This is especially true when new Houdini versions release and you have to edit the Deadline configs manually to work. I do think this is a good idea though.
John Yim
Hi Saul, I was wondering if there's any chance you could do a tutorial on setting up Deadline for Houdini with Redshift? I’ve been trying to set up a mini render farm at home for a while now, but I’m having trouble getting it to work across multiple machines. It would be amazing if you could cover this topic in the future, as there aren’t many resources available online particularly for Houdini + RS. 🙏
John Yim
Thanks Saul!
Saul Espinosa
I can share a basic example tomorrow for you to look at. There should be no effort to do now though, as a single click in the ROP Caustics should enable them, assuming your objects are also getting the new RS OBJ Properties. So I do think it’s strange you are having issues.
John Yim
that's so strange... I was just testing like your did (grid with mountain SOP & HDRI ) in your project file (so I don't have to worry about the ROP settings) but couldn't get any caustics at all, nothing in caustics AOV either... if you still have pool example file around would you mind sharing it?
Saul Espinosa
I had no issues with larger scenes, I made a pool example a few weeks ago while testing it. It should just work, all I did was drop down a sunny sky HDR and it worked out of the box stings my pool surface using a mountain SOP to displace the surface. Are you trying to light the pool with an infinite light or something some other light with no surface area? In which case brute force caustics will fail, the light needs to have actual real surface area.
John Yim
The new Brute Force Caustics is amazing for product/interior shots! However, I am still struggling to get caustics to work on larger scale scenes e.g pool caustics, not sure if I am setting things up incorrectly, but would love to see more tutorials on caustics at a larger scale
Saul Espinosa
That’s usually fine for most cases where it’s a solid object, but nested transmission can run into trouble, and then this can cause the caustics to be improperly refracted. Redshift doesn’t have manual sorting of nested dielectrics per shader yet, but it handles nested dielectrics through the detection of seperate meshes with seperate IOR values or shaders automatically. But in Houdini if your 2 transmissive objects are in the same OBJ node then this can sometimes fail to detect correctly the IOR response between the two objects. Eventually when Redshift adds manual sorting of Nested Dielectrics into the Standard Surface shader it won’t be a problem, but currently that is not a feature we support.
Mario Domingos
Just wondering, doesn't RS look at geo islands to check for separate geometries?
