How to make nice glass of wine (Maya 4.5, MRFM 1.5)? When turning caustics on, all shadow shaders are going off and resulting solid black shadows. Even shadow cast by internal side of glass on surface of wine.
It is said, that is to prevent double illumination (one through shadow shader, another through transmitted photons). On the other hand, there is a Caustics plugin for Maya 4.0 with tutorial (glass of wine), but it is no working with Maya 4.5.
Are you using dmap shadows? To get the effect you want you need to raytrace the shadows.
Yes. I'm using raytraced shadows. I've noticed, that LightWave is doing this in the same way. When turning on caustics, transparency of shadows is disabled.
Now I think, that key is to do so hudge caustics to illuminate black shadows. But how to adjust caustics to such delicate ilumination?
Here is picture without caustics:
http://www.pinktank.pl/3d/glassofwine01.jpg
And here is with caustics:
http://www.pinktank.pl/3d/glassofwine02.jpg
In the second image with caustics and shadow the wine appears darker over all. So maybe it's material need sto be more transaparent so that it's casts a lighter shadow.
Transparency is 1.0 (100%)
Is that %100 for both glass and wine?
Wine is red of course. Transparency is R:0.573 G:0.0 B:0.234
But as you can see glass is castig hard shadow also. Compare with glassofwine01.jpg where is border between shadows.
Off the top of my head .. have you tried giving the caustic photons more energy?
Thats the point, but how much? There must be easier way to set exact energy than waiting for results whole night. I've saw pictures from Caustics Plugin help (Maya 4.0), but added scene does not working with Maya 4.5.
All I need is one good example:
Distance?
Energy?
Accuracy?
Ok. Im going to set up a scene and go to bed.
Well you wouldn't want to use the Maya cuastics plugin if you ar eusing MR I would think.
To speed things up I while testing lower you raytrace settings, increase the value for accuracy which actually decreases accuracy and decreases render time.
I don't think distance and energy actually effects rendertime.
Here it is.
http://www.pinktank.pl/3d/glassofwine03.jpg
How to reduce a grain? White caustics is ok but red (2 times refracted) is not. Increase number of photons?
Yeah you got too few caustic photons thus the spots...
I haven't figured out how to tint the caustics yet either..
If you are using Maya 4.5 just make transparency of your material colorful. I my scene I used as transparency ramp shader to make wine more opaqe on borders.
If you are using Maya 4.0 download plugin from AW page named mayaCaustics_40.zip
There is tutorial with sample file.
As you can see I've changed form of glass. Previous had to thick bottom so refraction was to strong.
If you are using Maya 4.5 just make transparency of your material colorful.
Weird I was doing that.. I thought???
