Cinema 4D - How to get caustic reflections in water with Redshift

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You can find caustics in many places throughout reality. Caustic reflections in water are probably one of the most well known examples. Here's a quick look at how you can produce similar results using Redshift and Cinema 4D.
In this scene I have an infinite light emitting caustic photons through a water surface onto the geometry below. The light is emitting 5,000,000 photons and the intensity multiplier is set to 1.
I also have an HDRI lighting my scene and background but there are no caustic photons emitting from it. I found the caustic effect was more art directable if I used an infinite light.
In the Redshift render settings, under the Caustic tab I adjusted my Blur Radius to 0.5.
To create the water surface I used the xparticles generator xpOcean. If you don't have xparticles you could use a plugin called HOT4D, or you can apply a displacement deformer to a plane and use an animated noise texture to get a very similar result.
The water surface has a Redshift object tag added to it - under the Visibility tab I've turned on the Overrides and turned on "Casts Caustic Photons" under the Global Illumination tab.
I think it's important to remember that these are the settings I used given the way I set up my scene. You'll probably have to adjust these to dial in your caustics correctly. If you're having any trouble with these Caustic settings please refer to my Caustic quick start video for more details.

[@iZeStudio]

Hi Taylor, your Redshift videos are really helpful, thanks for putting these together! Is the rubber duck scene something you rendered out on a render farm or on your workstation, and about how long did it take? I tried rendering a similar scene (water shader w/ animated noise) with an RTX 3080, but I think my scene was optimized poorly (a single frame was going to take impossibly long).

[@롸-t9c]

Hi~ I am your subscriber. I would like to take a look at this scene project file. If you could, I would like to buy it. Thank you.

[@jellykid]

How did you get the Duck to wobble to the waves?

[@the-astropath]

I believe I used a position constraint to pin the duck to the deformed plane.