Jong / Unit 15: Water Caustics SketchUp + Vray

Monday 11 July 2011

Water Caustics SketchUp + Vray

1. Make the simple box swimming pool and water surface.

2. Paint the water part with any colour and change the name as 'water' to recognise them easily on Vray material.

3. Import 'Pool water.vismat' file. It can be downloaded in here, http://www.mediafire.com/?l8xyr3nqhca419b

The important thing is that the water surface's top side has to be white side. If your object has turquoise, then right click and choose 'reverse faces'.

This is Vray rendered image. Left one is the result when turquoise side is top, right one is the correct result when the white side is top

4. Turn the caustic on in the Vray option. We still can't see the water caustic because the size of the sun is not big enough.

5. Go to Environment in Vray option and click 'M'. Then, change Phonton Radius to 1000 and Casustic subdivs to 6000.

We almost get there but there is another issue which the caustic sunshine doesn't cover the objects. I struggled ages with this. I though bigger sun size would solve this problem but it didn't work. I tried to change the time and finally cover them all but I didn't get the specific time shadows.
Simply just move the object into the caustic sunshine area and job done :)