a few days ago when my wife had a shower (no, stop your naughty thoughts right there) i saw some light coming out of the bathroom door which was left open a little gap, while the rest of the house was dark showing me an array of light beams on the floor. as a part time professional and artistic photographer i am always intrigued by light play, shadow play and any physical artefacts thereof.
since i am still in Cycles test mode it was a perfect excuse to quickly rebuild that in Rhino. figuring out what actually caused the effect led me rethink and to experiment with the set up and accidentally found out that Cycles seems to be based on some kind of physical additive light system. probably normal but i did not test that in any other application yet and happily surprised by the result i thought i share it with you.
the answer is all in the above and easier as it seems. i am sure you figure it out soon. i dont want to give away this little riddle too fast since it was nice getting there with a surprise.
interesting, i think this effect is a based off of its geometry at which angle the light beams enter which leads to this natural result in 3d of turning up side down and left to right.
and to some degree you are not far from the truth!
glad your cracked it i hope you had some fun. also how long did you render it? mine took forever, i also wanted to pump up the volume on the emission a bit to get a clearer image but man does it take long on my machine so i avoided trying again due to lack of time
rendering 5 minutes and its still grainy as hell i mean
alright Nathan, found some time and thought i give it another go. also i figured that when the render is not in foreground or hidden, at least on mac, it keeps elapsing the time but does not render further and therefore renders much longer. a test with the same render set up with 500 path tracing samples revealed that one time it needed 30 minutes when it was mostly in the background and one time when i suspected this happening keeping it in foreground basically watching, it was done in 4-5 minutes
@goozoon it would be better to quote the section you are referring to. scrutinizing the entire topic trying to find out what you are talking about is not always as easy as here…
nevermind
me too would like some caustics in cycles. there have been approaches but i am not sure what their status is, it has been a while since i researched this topic. and if any of these will make it into cycles at all and how @nathanletwory will handle it.
As far as I know no new features per se have been planned yet. Cycles X is a reachitecture of Cycles, going for feature parity with old Cycles, and at most adding some new backends (HIP, maybe others).
But if any new features like caustics would be worked on it will definitely happen after Cycles X is in, so essentially in Cycles X codebase, not pre-Cycles X
hi @Artstep as far as i can tell you seem to be on the right track, the image you are showing was what i initially saw and triggered my motivation to rebuild it from scratch, it is basically just on step away. but to clarify, what exactly do you mean by colour of the lights?
What you are seeing there is a [redacted]. I tried various ways of reflecting light and playing with falloff settings, but it seems everything stays white - I did notice not all lights are created equal in terms of producing colour, this is with point lights if that’s the mistake?
since it was nice getting there with a surprise.
so i avoided trying again due to lack of time
