Blender Caustics Comparisons | Cycles, AMD ProRender, Octane Render and LuxCore

This video looks at rendering caustics in Cycles, AMD ProRender, Octane Render and LuxCore Render. It uses a simple scene where I have a glass pitcher and a rounded background and a single light to look at the differences in how caustics are presented in each engine.
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[@djtutorialscgi]

Go here for LuxCore newest dev builds: github.com/LuxCoreRender/BlendLuxCore/releases

[@clehaxze]

Fun fact. LuxCore (previously LuxRenderer) is based on PBRT. And PBRT is a renderer developed to teach rendering to computer graphics students. It's accurate, supports everything up to the most difficult to render stuff and is learned by almost every renderer developer at some point.

[@djtutorialscgi]

How great!!! Thanks for sharing.

[@SZMIDEL]

The more I learn the more there is to learn... LuxCore, here I come

[@djtutorialscgi]

Yep- that’s the way it is. You know you’re a master when you think you know nothing yet everyone tells you how amazing you are. The more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know.

[@poopiecon1489]

cycles is good enough for now

[@GaryParris]

Whenever i want realistic glass effects - Luxcore has always been my go to even in earlier versions, it is hugely underrated it is the most realistic when it comes to caustics and blender users should have it in their toolbag in my opinion, its an amazing render engine! and there are lots to tweak and use, in the right hands it is simply awesome! Luxcore is free and gives us Blender users yet another option, why not have all of them, workbench, EEVEE, Cycles x and Luxcore! :O)

[@djtutorialscgi]

Indeed! Thanks for the insights!

[@ScraggyDogg]

Many thanks for that, I've got Octane & blender, but never knew luxcore was free too. Cheers Gary

[@flonkplonk1649]

I really like indoor renderings with Luxcore ! WAY more realistic than Cycles..

[@PaoloLiCausi]

I was wondering what the Luxcore version was in this video. Thanks for the nice video!

[@djtutorialscgi]

Of course!!!

[@chj.schwarz]

really enjoy these comparisons. Luxcore is a beast, gotta get back into it.

[@djtutorialscgi]

Thank you! It is pretty awesome just make sure to grab the dev build if you’re running the new versions of Blender.

[@intgr]

Doesn’t octane have photon mapping capabilities for caustics in Blender? That would create much more sophisticated caustics than showed. Also, there aren’t any caustics in OG Cycles since the irradiance is clamped heavily by default. Turn down the indirect lighting clamping to 0, and do the same for filter glossy in the caustics tab. And turn up the glossy max bounces to like 50. Also I’d suggest you look into path guiding. It works on cpu only but it does wonders.

[@djtutorialscgi]

Octane just released a free version with photon mapping recently, which I will be doing a video on. Still, in my testing, luxcore’s versatility in the multidirectional caustics surpasses Octane. Cycles does not have multi direction caustics like LuxCore does even when you change the clamp values etc.

[@TomasHradckyComposer]

I’ll give LuxCore a look. 🙏

[@DRAVIASTUDIO]

Nice tutorial. just want to add that increasing the specular value from 6(default to 16/32/64) make better internal refraction as well as get you rid of the dark refration in Luxcore.

[@djtutorialscgi]

Thank you!

[@jadeidkabir5395]

Hyped! Good luck!

[@djtutorialscgi]

Thanks! Good luck for what though ???

[@jadeidkabir5395]

@@djtutorialscgi I thought it'd be a livestream 😅

[@djtutorialscgi]

@@jadeidkabir5395 oh yeah sorry. I might some day but I have construction going on right now :(

[@ScraggyDogg]

King of Caustics was Mental Ray, so easy even all those years ago I loved it, darn shame it went. and much more accurate it seemed although I'm no expert.

[@Leukick]

Well I do video, so if Luxcore can render frames as fast as Cycles then I would use it

[@arkenavetisyan7308]

I agree Luxcore is the best!

[@ThatGuy-Official]

Would be useful to know version info for the rendering engines and the blender version you use for your tests.

[@djtutorialscgi]

Probably correct but this is rather old so I was using whatever the newest official build was at the time.

[@ThatGuy-Official]

@djtutorialscgi That's fine. Was still a good showcase, and I still appreciate the time and effort you spent to present this to us. I had never even heard of Lux Core before watching this.

[@djtutorialscgi]

@ThatGuy-Official very good engine. Unfortunately no $$support to devs. I wish Blender official would adopt their engine qualities and implement

[@Slickstaff_Stainpants]

I dont seem to understand why the CPU is needed in Luxcore and what the percentage of Light Rays is used for.

[@djtutorialscgi]

CPU is needed to calculate the bidirectional rays. It’s just how it’s done I suppose- probably the same as how the CPU calculated other things like simulations and subdivisions etc.

[@haruruben]

I can’t even get it to install in 3.3, just going into link hell in forums trying to find the right version… sketchy. I’m like going all over. If they want people to try it how about put a link to 3.x on the download page or something

[@djtutorialscgi]

Crud. I meant to put the link in the video description. Here’s the link to the dev build github.com/LuxCoreRender/BlendLuxCore/releases

[@haruruben]

@@djtutorialscgi nice,’thanks

[@flonkplonk1649]

Can you use Agx in Luxcore somehow?

[@GreenBlueWalkthrough]

really like what Luxcore does but man is it hard to get a good render out of it. Like It took me a day just to figure out you had to manually set your render stop and now it crashes for no reason... But when it works it looks really good.

[@djtutorialscgi]

I will do a video soon that runs through some basics. No worries.

[@GreenBlueWalkthrough]

@@djtutorialscgi Thanks! The settings I do need help with.

[@GaryParris]

there are some other tutorials out there to view that have been around a while, but Mr DJtutorials i am sure can make some good ones for all to get started

[@MrJdeffp007]

well i think blender shadow caustics are ok, we definitely need more dispersion and shadow raytrace control to trace deeper than the standards lighting offers and default render settings in cycles, eeve etc,. Dispersion GLARES are essential for doing glass and glares that are tiny and not over blown.

[@djtutorialscgi]

This might be the first time someone commented on my vide before it’s premiered :)

[@maxmaxed2887]

Put liquid inside a glass in Cycles X. You will see there is no caustics at all as cycles is unable to calculate that. So no, Cycles X caustics suck

[@augm3nt384]

The Cycles render looks like a cartoon render compared to LuxCore !! .. Light Years ahead. Plus Lux core also supports older AMD GPUs whereas Cycles has dropped support for them.

[@djtutorialscgi]

I definitely appreciate the work the devs have put into the engine. I would love for Blender and LuxCore to collaborate on making this more than just an addon.

[@sinc222]

At the end of the video you make the vase metallic. From there on you are looking at indirect specular NOT caustics.

[@SantoSVD98]

Is luxcore free for Blender?

[@djtutorialscgi]

Yes

[@qedqubit]

??? so octane doesn't do any caustics at all ? just shadows full of fireflies ??? uhmm... if you gonna showcase LuxCore's caustics, use the BiDir renderer ! BiDir is the essence of caustics render-ability !

[@djtutorialscgi]

The bidirectional is basically on when you use light tracing but light tracing uses both your GPU and CPU. It’s basically the same thing. Regarding Octane- of course it does caustics- I showed it. It’s just very limited and not as easy to exaggerate in its current form.

[@qedqubit]

@@djtutorialscgi uh... oh... 'kay. 😅😆😁

[@cevxj]

He's wrong lol, there's so much you can do with octane.

[@qedqubit]

@@cevxj good; i found it hard to believe, thanks 😀 !

[@SteveThinman]

Blender is getting more and more attention in the automotive design studios. Unfortunately there is no content available from these studios (due to obvious reasons) and therefore these use cases are on no one's radar. It's a real shame as the cost pressure for car companies increases and therefore more and more use cases gets evaluated and adopted. One of them could be physically correct light renderings for automotive lighting. This is where Luxcore could shine very brightly. It would be great if the developers would realize this and if they would continue the development. It's still early days as there are no measured materials for LuxCore and therefore creating realistic looks is a lot of trial and error. If more people in different studios are able to create their material and light libraries for everyday use then I think (hope) that financial contribution towards the developers could also be achieved. It needs another year maybe two but I'm absolutely sure that it will happen if LuxCore remains available.

[@cr4723]

"the cost pressure for car companies increases" Not really. Automotive design studios work with Alias (60.000€) and Vred (30.000€). These big companies really don't need this Hobby-Blender-Prog. ;) And as for the materials: make your own!

[@SteveThinman]

@@cr4723 Well, my daily work is building cars with Alias AutoStudio and I'm working for a design studio (as an employee, not a contractor). I can tell you that license cost is becoming a major issue nowadays especially because Autodesk doesn't deliver anything for that money. (I can surely tell this after using PowerAnimator/AutoStudio for nearly 30 years). The sheer development pace of Blender and the fact that for all this development it's free... makes a lot of people thinking why they pay so much for Autodesk products. Especially in the case of VRED. There is not much what Blender can't do what VRED can... For free. In regard of the measured materials: for a light SIMULATION (SIMULATION, not fancy renderings) you need real, measured materials.

[@cr4723]

​@@SteveThinman The old Alias has features that no other software has. Alias takes advantage of this and the companies pay like stupid sheep. V-RED looks a thousand times more accurate, with more image depth, than Cycles. Cycles produces fireflies, isn't real-time, and is cumbersome to use. Blender's cumbersome workflow prevents professional use. Free is not the most important thing!

[@NCSiebertdesign]

​@@cr4723 you have no clue what you're talking about. I'm following certain automotive designers and they're definitely already using blender in their design process. Obviously alias is used before production process. Cycles render is capable of rendering. So you don't have a clue what you're saying.

[@cr4723]

@@NCSiebertdesign I'm working in automotive industry. We have no blender. If we work with polygons, we use Maya. We make renders with V-Red. No cycles. Are you a blender fan boy? 😄

[@rajendrameena150]

I am second one. But I am wondering why you think luxcore is still better than cyles after so many cycles improvement.

[@djtutorialscgi]

Well- you have to watch the video when it comes out :)

[@dash3dot]

That's actually pretty easy to answer because the caustics in Cycles are ok at best and it's a loooong way before we can call it a viable option for any professional work that requires caustics. But I'm eager to see the video :)

[@GaryParris]

Luxcore is better, it's far more realistic with glass and caustics etc and it's also free, you can use both renderers without leaving Blender, and 2 are better than one and so that make 4 reasons to have Blender!

[@djtutorialscgi]

Every engine seems to have its positives and negatives. I interchangeably use 4 on projects depending on what I need.

[@GaryParris]

@@djtutorialscgi absolutely :O)

[@cevxj]

there's like 4 rendering engines in Octane.... lmao. Each successively better for caustics.

[@djtutorialscgi]

Yeah- it’s quite versatile.

[@maxmaxed2887]

Do you know if LuxCore is basically dead at this point? I know that main dev left the team and other devs are mostly from Russia which makes it kinda unreliable to use as a main render engine for work projects since you need to convert everything to LuxCore materials. I'm just worried at some point it dies completely and it's all going to hang in the air.

[@djtutorialscgi]

It’s not dead, but if you really want to see it work more make stuff with it, share it and donate to the LuxCore foundation.

[@maxmaxed2887]

@@djtutorialscgi Where is that foundation? I googled and there is nothing

[@djtutorialscgi]

@@maxmaxed2887 basically there’s a fund on the LuxCore page somewhere. I’m sure it’s n the discussion threads or something somewhere. You can also support them by putting in bounty requests for things you want.

[@maxmaxed2887]

@@djtutorialscgi really can't find any lol. They should make it more apparent on their website, geez!

[@maxmaxed2887]

They really need a material converter. Current Cycles support implementation is useless since most Cycles materials do not display correctly. And it would make much more sense to convert nodes to LuxCore editor to adjust there