Creating Beautiful Water Caustics in Blender

Free caustic images download:
drive.google.com/drive/folder...
Fantasy Environments Course:
www.maxhayart.com/fantasy-env...

[@MuhammadQasim-lg2bs]

I remember seeing this post on instagram the other day and was thinking gosh I wish there was a good tutorial on making water look like that, my man max served us right away. Ty :)

[@josephhennessy2978]

facts!!!

[@GortTeam]

bruh same

[@DigiCube4]

Bro........these tutorials. You really got me in blender learnin. Thank you!

[@simonzhang3D]

Instead of inserting keyframes you can just type in the property : #frame. This way you have it animated the moment you press play. If you want to make it slower just divide it like #frame/500. This saves some time :)

[@spydergs07]

This is a great work around to not only make it look very realistic, but cuts down on render time big time, and you don't get noise from normal caustics. Very well done.

[@quochaihaikahai4309]

Always learn new things from your videos, thanks so much, bro !

[@HarryPotterFan1307]

Bro, your skills are nasty. Keep the content coming man. Tier one for sure.

[@itsjuliao]

I was literally searching and experimenting with water caustics last week! This video is perfect timing

[@pandoraslove840]

THIS IS GENIUS!!!!!! I went through so many video on how to make water causics, Geometry nodes, procedials and other thing that didn't work. BUT THIS was quick, simple, easy to understand AND IT WORKS EFFECTIVLY OMG THX SO MUCH!!!!!

[@SourceAwareness]

Pure Genius, Thanks Max!! Your work is Top Notch. 😎

[@FeatheryWonders]

Really love your work man! ❤

[@maxhayart]

Thank you

[@drewiis]

❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥 thank you for this!

[@tyler.t.seaman]

Great video Max, thanks for sharing!

[@Raiin0311]

holy this is SO much esiaer then what Ive done before haha. Thanks Max!

[@user-ty5qv7er6f]

very useful,tnx, especially when you've shown using textures with light objects

[@orcanimal]

Beautiful stuff!

[@collinsk8754]

Brilliant! 🔥🔥

[@EZVR247]

:) Nice :) Clever use of the water image to drive the emission Alpha!

[@MCSteve_]

If you search up ray types in blender docs you can see a diagram of a traced example. So the Camera Ray is the first ray from the camera before it turns into something else (when hitting a surface). So by masking if it is a Camera Ray or not, you can mask for only the surface in effect. From testing I believe it is the Shadow Ray which is screwing you over. I am certain that filtering by Camera Ray is the not the most accurate since it does lose out on the surface to send diffuse reflections and the other types (ex. the consequence is that if you see the water in the reflection of another object, the water is invisible). So if you want to have that you can filter by Shadow Ray (you have to invert it since you _dont_ want shadow casting, which can be done via color ramp). You dont have to do this in shader either, you can do this to the whole object by going to object properties > visibility > uncheck shadow (though using these properties is not always desirable if the object has more than one material or like you want more control). You could turn off Diffuse as well if you dont want bounce lighting. Of course you dont have to turn it off any of these rays completely by multiplying (or use like a color ramp) if you want that control. The benefit of turning off all the rays besides directly Camera is that it is cheap (as it there is less compute), just choose your best fit poison! The power of tweaking Light Paths! Lovely tutorial of controlled caustics, great examples and looks great

[@salatr3s659]

GENIUS...

[@patnor7354]

Great stuff

[@richardconway6425]

This is really clever Max! Very resourceful, a bit like using animated gobos with your light source, but a different approach. I thought the end result looked really good, and the colour pallette was very appealing too. Lots of lovely green shades on my juiced up amoled Samsung tablet. I didn't realise that you could project an image with an area light, that's not entirely intuitive, but very useful to know. One thing I would find very interesting, is if you rendered the same scene in cycles, but with caustics enabled instead. So 'real' caustics instead of the faked ones. I would be very curious to see what it looks like, and also what it does to the render time. Your machine must be very fast, because the viewport performance for rendering (it was rendering in cycles, right?) was so quick. You must have at least one 4090, if not two. Did you colour grade the final output in 3rd party software? Colours looked so good.

[@Tachastasiia]

I am completely blown away by the fact that you can see your cycles render view so easily... I have no idea how my animation of caustics looks like.. it's all blurred and denoised..

[@lavatr8322]

Dude has 24GB of VRAM lol

[@simonzhang3D]

4090 :D

[@afromixstudios]

I like that video you say on how you started blender No school No direction 😂😂😂

[@AUSCIPHER]

Nice!

[@senatoraz]

genius

[@winkblue6851]

any good tuts about using quixel in blender?

[@Corza]

Smart!

[@landel_]

I took some time from Blender and I was kinda 'meh' to come back. What a nice tutorial to push me back! Amazing work! And thanks for the valuable tips! Also: How much post-production do you use in movie editing softwares?

[@TECHDAWN]

❤

[@nafiz2755]

bro is the Michelangelo of blender scenes

[@hans27450]

i wouldn't want to kill my laptop attempting this

[@sanskii2347]

Nice tutorial, I wonder if making the spread of the caustic area light to be a very low value (like 1° instead of exactly 0°)would probably solve the problem of caustics not appearing on those 90° faces, so we wouldn't need extra area lights. Also how did you make the caustics appear on surfaces out of the water, like in those pillars in the initial rendered scene of the video? Did you make the caustics area light bidirectional somehow or was it something else?

[@richardconway6425]

He added additional spotlights around the scene, like ones pointing directly at the pillars, and used the same node setup he used for the area light, with the fake caustic effect.

[@siray5382]

😍😍♥️♥️♥️♥️

[@Rawrlz]

Awesome thank you! Odd request but can you make any tutorials n64 style graphic effects?

[@mastermill79]

Would there be a caustic effect to that extent on the very shallow parts as well?

[@thecodinguru]

Can't we use #frame for the w values?

[@jahluu6825]

when I put the spread to zero, it goes invisible entirely. luckily, the water in my scene isn't exactly super visible so i can forgo it for now but i would like to know if there's a workaround

[@jahluu6825]

i figured out the solution BTW. if anyone was planning to say "recalculate normals" you would have been right. The shape of my body of water was pretty complex, had it going down a canal. so I guess all those extrusions sorta messed with it.

[@IsraelSocial]

I'm new on this of making scenarios on Ue 5, can you import it to ue 5?

[@richardconway6425]

Not directly, no. I mean, you can't just take the whole animated scene and just drop it into unreal. You can import all the models, the hard surface environment stuff, but unreal uses its own shaders, so you have to set up all your materials in UE with unreal's shaders. That's my understanding. Look into 'bridge' addons that help you do the blender>unreal thing, like blender2unreal. I don't use unreal, but I am interested in it. Perhaps something like USD export may help with this in the future, but I don't think that is possible yet.

[@aurafireheart]

How the fluff do you have an option to add a node setup to a light source. Mine doesn't have that option. I even downloaded the latest version (4.1 at time of writing this) from the official Blender site and it doesn't have that option either.

[@maxhayart]

In the shader editor you have to press the Use Nodes checkbox with the light selected

[@aurafireheart]

@@maxhayart That's what I'm saying. The 'Use Nodes' checkbox doesn't show up at all, whether the light is selected or not.

[@richardconway6425]

@@aurafireheart is your rendering mode set to cycles? I don't think this option would be available in eevee.

[@aurafireheart]

@@richardconway6425 oh its in cycles. Now see that makes a little more sense and would have been really helpful to know what mode it was meant to be in at the start of the video. Thanks for the help, friend.

[@richardconway6425]

@@aurafireheart yeah, we've all been caught out by this kind of thing in blender. I remember getting really frustrated in the compositor, because I couldn't see the options I wanted for denoise. Problem? I hadn't enabled cycles as the render option. 😭

[@luckyblockfatality]

im using cycles but the light path node to alpha is not making it transparent transmission is set properly

[@luckyblockfatality]

i fix it, metallic was wrong

[@montydog990]

i would say the caustics look a bit unnatural as they dont really tend to scroll like that and is more of a dancing in place motion. but looks amazing none the less, especially on freeze frame

[@legoshi4400]

I can’t seem to get the beam size to go below 1. Is there some kind of work around?

[@insirra5361]

Same here, and I don’t understand why

[@maxhayart]

Can you click the field and type the value manually? Also make sure you're in the newest version of blender

[@LawsOnJoystick]

why does his render viewport always look better, if i use one spot light it looks terrible

[@davidfranktenora9255]

Hey Max, could you cindly discolse, what is your pc setup, I wonder if I can make these renders with 32 gigs of ram with 4060ti 12gb of vram

[@adithyank.r.5455]

i think he uses rtx 4090 24gb vram and with 12gb of 4060ti and 32 gb ram u can handle these renders smoothly but it might take more time to render

[@davidfranktenora9255]

@@adithyank.r.5455 hey thanks for your response, I am currently in the market for a new pc and thinking of 2 options, either take a better graphics card 4070ti SUPER 16gb and 32gb ram OR 4060Ti 16gb and 64gb ram. Which one is more important in your opinion.. Thx

[@adithyank.r.5455]

@@davidfranktenora9255 in my opinion the 4070ti Super will be better as you can upgrade the ram later too

[@DhananjayPathak-wo5ym]

Not working With OLD BSDF

[@noaclarke3801]

this doesn't work for me, the image colour shows but no details from the image do, someone pls help

[@maxhayart]

Are you using an area light? and is the spread of the light set to 0?

[@softcrm8713]

@@maxhayart i have the same problem, yes its an area light and when you set the beam to 0 it only shows the primary colour of the picture without the beam spreading. Couldnt figure it out yet

[@softcrm8713]

okay, so the picture kind of appears divided in 4 pcitures when you put a texture coordinate with mapping in front and set the texture coordinate to object and you scale it down with mapping. But I dont know what that means or how to fix it.

[@sreliata]

My question would be: can you create something like this in eevee? ._.

[@richardconway6425]

Short answer: no.

[@abdullahhaider6889]

how do i make money with enviromental art in blender?

[@FoxRenderfarm]

Hi Max, your tutorials are truly exceptional! I was wondering if you'd be open to exploring a potential collaboration opportunity between us?

[@YASHGUPTA-od4rk]

bro is a jujutsu kaizen fan he just created a simple domain

[@mirrors330]

Yo