Easy Caustics in Blender!

[@CartesianCaramel]

If you would like the full procedural fish Blender file, it is up on my Gumroad page: bbbn19.gumroad.com/l/udlwo

[@Logan_wlt]

hey, the result is not the same for me. what is the BSDF connected to ? please.

[@austintownsendmusic7666]

Nice job, thanks for posting! Im curious how you would feel about using a similar node setup on the light itself and the difference between the two methods?

[@rovvxyoon]

Hello! I Downloaded this project and I wanna change ehis color blue. How can I change it?

[@KingKong19100]

Dude you are absolutely KILLING it!

[@Lo_vid]

Node wizard strikes again

[@metaverseplayer]

PLEASE MAKE THE FISH TUTORIAL 😭😭😭

[@benadler9193]

It would help if you showed how you set up the scene, as the cut, beveled cube (I'm assuming) you used as the background was stretched at the top for me and I couldn't work out how to stop this to make the sunlight-ripple effect look more natural and random. Other than that thanks for the great tutorial!

[@maxdergai327]

Is It possible to loop these caustics?

[@Bezhodeft]

Bless you everyday, thankyou once again for the tutorials, your explanation on how the nodes works it's really good.

[@dumpsky]

supercool! an option would be to use '4D' Voronoi and animate 'W' value. setting it to 'F1 Smooth' gives you a 'Smoothness' parameter, which is nice for simulating deeper waters with less sharp caustics.

[@AllAcacia]

Thanks for this helpful tutorial! Understanding ways to use nodes is forever going to be a thing I keep learning about.

[@sharonrairai5479]

Awsome I did it wow

[@21EC]

So fucking cool, this is like the best most realistic and awesome fake Cycles caustics I've seen so far, I wonder how come that your technique of achieving this effect did not become known and popular, this should have much more views, it's a cool effect many Blender artists probably don't know about.

[@bosskerz7741]

Show what keys your hitting next time

[@coleorloff]

Hey dude. Your tutorials are amazing! Thank you for sharing your knowledge. If you use a Linear Light to mix in a 4D Noise Texture right before the Voronoi Texture and animate the W with the same driver as the Add Vector Math node, it adds some really nice, realistic distortion.

[@CartesianCaramel]

That does work, but it is extremely expensive.

[@coleorloff]

@@CartesianCaramel I definitely appreciate how you place a premium on efficiency. I also added in an AO node to remove the Voronoi from object close to the ground or each other. Looks great...assuming that's also super costly, computing-wise.

[@LeumeisterVeritas]

Is this color mixing the two, or are you sending it into the Voronoi texture itself, like in the vector input or something?

[@coleorloff]

I forget what I did exactly. But I was probably using the AO node to mask out the Voronoi caustics pattern. @@LeumeisterVeritas

[@LeumeisterVeritas]

@@coleorloff No, not the AO, I meant the noise. I'm trying to get a more "realistic" distortion to the Voronoi (which looks passably good on its own, but I wanna go the extra mile), so it looks a little _more_ like water caustics.

[@Smooth_Shading]

This is awesome! Thanks for putting this together man. Really well explained. Keep up the great work!

[@DanielPartzsch]

Cool! One question regarding your tutorials: you never seem to use the 4d noise and simply animate the w value for animating the texture. Is there any particular reason for that? Is it more expansive or does animating the position cause some better results? Thank you!

[@CartesianCaramel]

I don't use 4D textures mainly because it is very expensive, and the stretching caused by this method is a tad more accurate to real caustics.

[@8sat_]

Fast way you can add some of that nice continuous dispersion just to the caustics in the compositor by checking emission in the view layers and then using it as a mix mask between the image with a few lens distortion nodes with projector on & dispersion set to 1, mixed with the base image. helps to multiply the emission pass a little in the compositor too. They are a little dull though, if anyone has any ideas to improve them lmk!

[@WW_Studios]

Another great video! I guess there isn't a "raycast" shader node for the shader editor... because if there was you could use that to make sure the caustics don't appear underneath the cube or fish. I guess AO could work for that maybe...

[@CartesianCaramel]

Technically there is a way using the shader to RGB node as a mask, but it is very inconsistent.

[@pzez2781]

cool! I tried it

[@francoestrada6586]

goat

[@pzez2781]

Awesome tut! and that custom falloff trick is GEM!

[@TedBarnett197]

Any way to make this material transparent so that the effect can be applied, for example, to a rocky river bottom? I tried setting all color value alphas accordingly, but it never seemed to work.

[@flofdev]

You can use a vertex group to specify where the caustics should be

[@WwAiRtRhIiOnR]

Did you know that you can add nodes to lights? (cycles, no clue if it works in eevee) You can use it to fake the caustics in the light so it handles the bottom itself and shadows from objects will also be correct. Seen this light nodes in several tutorials, here's one if you want to check. kzbin.info/www/bejne/jmq8nn1mr6yKftk

[@davidmcsween]

No nodes for eevee sadly. You can't map textured to them but you can mask them with a flag made from geometry or texture set to Alpha hashed

[@BlenderBrit]

Great little tutorial! Easy to implement and super effective, thanks.

[@ethanvampirehntr]

This is seriously awesome! Gonna try this out soon!

[@hmhmhnhmhm]

I wanna buy fish object, but there is some kind of page error issue! could u fix it?

[@neilmarshall5087]

Do memorize Ctrl-J as the 'J'oin selected nodes in a frame shortcut. Less effort. And its standard - not Node Wrangler. So no confusion for viewers....

[@vstreet7583]

Just BRILLIANT! Thank you! Dg

[@SviatoslavPetrov]

Today I passed your tutorial & after that, look result in VR. Awesome deep effect! Thanks so much for interesting tutorials!

[@premiero]

I've been following you on twitter for a long time, very grateful that you finally made a youtube channel :D

[@pineapplepizzasandwich1974]

By far the best fake caustics i've seen. Thanks so much.

[@tolgayldz1898]

this is much cheaper than the light node setup, but still this will not give ray gods that can be created in that setup when we introduce the volumetrics. Great stuff for real time fake caustics!

[@digital0785]

Two things. How do you do it based off the light ? And would there be way to have some slight effect on the bottom to be faking reflective caustics too since it technically would have that and so it based off the distance from the floor

[@totheknee]

+💯 for the logarithm trick on the Voronoi falloff. I tried lots of methods, but none worked as well as yours!

[@olgwoodart4996]

Thank you for the tutorial. Easy only thanks to your smarts.

[@yannterrer]

Genius! Tks for sharing;)

[@jjbchem]

bro i just looked at your gumroad and you are an amazing person, all those projects look so cool

[@TheHauntedSockdrawer]

amazing tutorial! works like a charm!

[@nasuf8358]

Where I'm i suppost to get the fish modell

[@avistryfe4534]

Make one of course. It is blender after all.

[@RomboutVersluijs]

I prefer using this sort same method on lights and also separate the RGB so we can soft color offset

[@Spacedewelope]

anyone know how to do it in clarisse?

[@Abdula-f5n]

This is awesome! great tutorials

[@aranganr]

Great tutorial. Thanks for sharing.

[@AArtfat]

Nice work man ty

[@tochezpab]

Thats fish movement is beautiful

[@GrandeGio95]

Amazing results with ease. Thanks !

[@BeatMax2023]

Very nice! Thanks for sharing!

[@lightmanleaf3761]

That’s beautiful! I followed your tutorial and made the node. However , I made my shader (with many nodes including ambient occlusion, glossy etc) for my object with emission node before the material output. How can I apply your caustics nodes to my object? I tried to use mix shade to combine the my emission node and the principal bsdf (with emission strength linked to your caustic node). It work but my object Color changed. How can I retain my object Color while applying your caustics node? Thank you!

[@aim__freakz8499]

very smart done! :)

[@Leukick]

You genius

[@alansmitheeart]

Great trick! Adding an RGB input node in the group and connecting it to an output would save you from manually setting the color each time too.

[@krishnasachanandani8036]

Oh my gosh thank you! I've been trying to work out how to do this on stylised/ NPR project and I think I can totally apply this!

[@joo275]

Beautiful 😍 nice job

[@smythee7835]

your tutorials are really great thank you. i just learned something super valuable!

[@spitfiredrago]

Thanks this is great!

[@devon.dulaney]

DO THE FISH

[@sndosc]

nice

[@valn3d]

amazing

[@gharibgamegg]

wow

[@adarshraj6489]

#frame/12 isn't working in my blender

[@victoriabillings881]

same. wondering if theres a new syntax now?

[@victoriabillings881]

oh wait try deleting the hashtag!

[@davidmcsween]

Hmmm, I wonder how you could get a shadow map from occlusions above the caustic surface? So that the cube or fish don't gather a caustic beneath them

[@samdzn]

how is your evee render scene looks this nice?

[@RenderEngine]

Damn, that's cool

[@hakanmenderes2441]

alsom

[@rsher_digital-art]

great work