Caustics and Dispersion are useful for creating realistic images of jewelry or consumer products that contain reflective or transparent elements. Think of gems or a wine glass. It will simulate the sparkling colors in a diamond or bright patterns under a glass.
How to use them?
To activate these, select the Product setting in the Rhino Render Advanced Settings on the Rendering panel, under Presets.
Hi! This is good to see progress on implementation of deeper rendering options.
It would appear the following notes:
Renders require higher levels of samples (expected)
The soft caustic (integrated) appears to be good, with nice soft edges as expected
The dispersed caustic is poor, with a denoiser almost being essential due to high levels of speckle.
The RGB nature of Cycles is very evident at macro views, where the separation visualises as Huffman-like compression glitches. This is more evident at higher contrast imaging.
Yes, I agree that more samples are needed for such calculation. For a modern 40-Series GPU, I am fine with 150k samples. However, the samples should decrease the speckling over time, not introduce more as the integration continues. Moreover, the speckles seem almost randomised, and do not cluster as expected for such a calculation.
I think there is some issue with convergence with the dispersive caustic that is throwing the calculation off severely. This seems to be exaggerated as Cycles is RGB only.
