I made these to try out the new ‘progressive caustics’ in Vray 5 update 2.3. Relatively slow but very easy to setup.
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you and eh vray of course make me jealous, i would like to have that in cycles either. 
did you cheat a bit with the refractive sun stars or is that part of vrays magic?
Caustics Setting?
@encephalon both are straight out of V-Ray, no post processing. Not sure though what you mean by:
just the default:
for transparent objects make sure to uncheck the marked setting:
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the green mark the spikes, the yellow shows some extra refraction.
edit: if that comes straight out of vray i am even more jealous 
ah those…yes also part of V-Ray (lens effects)
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Never used the “progressive” mode.
I don’t know what changes … I always used “new map”.
I’ll try…
In my render I used caustics in “new map” mode … calculation too slow:
caustics are slow in any mode unfortunately, the progressive mode will probably be slower even. Your scene is an example that is the most challenging for caustics rendering, basically the whole scene would be purely lit by caustics, making it extremely slow. Most likely render engines optimized for this kind of rendering will do that faster
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I agree.
Caustic lighting makes an extra contribution to light than other light sources. it is a challenging calculation.
I don’t like Vray settings: unclear and too redundant.
In my opinion, once the caustics have been applied, the software should automatically calculate the correct caustic according to the light intensity and the material, without many frills and unnecessary options.
I mentioned this to a Vray developer a few months ago.
It is a very beautiful work, almost hypnotising. Reminds me some Dutch painting of a still nature.
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here’s another very ver slow pure caustic render, trying to mimic one of my favorite lights (from occio)
Though this one was done with regular caustics, I don’t have the patience to make a noise free rendering
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I’m testing caustics with the new “progressive” mode. You see so many luminous spots, like so many luminous circles; how to increase the quality, the number of rays for calculating caustics?
I think there is only one way: render till infinity
I tried rendering for longer periods but the quality doesn’t seem to increase very much. It keeps being splotchy.
it is at the beginning of the calculation, but there are too many spots.
I don’t think they go away …
I think the only thing you can tweak is the search distance. Try a higher number. It will make the solution more blurry though.
Also keep in mind that your scene is probably one of the most challenging for caustics. An omnidirectional light. The first two examples I posted are much easier with a focused bundle of photons.
Like I mentioned earlier, Vray is not really a good render engine for this. You need a bidirectional pathtracer. I bet engines like Bella and Maxwell can render this more efficiently, but still needing a lot of computation time.
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The more you calculate, the more the spots disappear, they are reduced. It takes a lot of time…
In my opinion Vray should optimize this aspect better.
After almost two hours of rendering, I think the spots are less noticeable …
Probably pretty decent rendertime for caustics. You can see that the progressive result is more precise than the photon mapped you posted earlier.
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