the bblog

caustics

So I finally got caustics working in blender-yafray. Turns out you have to set the "blur" setting on the photon lamp, or else it doesn't, uh, blur. This is frame 161, and with 3052 vertexes and 5605 faces, it took 1 hour and 26 minutes to render, on a dual core 4500+ X2 (32-bit mode). For the whole animation (25 fps) it would take 14.9 days to render. So I guess I've got some optimizing to do.


(click for giant damn 1920x1200 original render)

I also have some tweaking to do on the caustics, (and add shadows, which are for some reason, missing) since at this point they're criminally unimpressive. Here's the exact same image using the blender internal renderer.


(click for giant damn 1920x1200 original render)

The surface is colored funny, since it's reflecting the sky instead of refracting the plane behind it, are the shadows are pretty low resolution, but that's something I can overlook or code around for a 344% increase in performance. (25 minute 47 second)

So yeah, I guess I was wildly optimistic when I said "in a couple of days" two weeks ago.