daveb867

ok thanks i'l look into it.

joh i notice you are based in manchester??? what sort of work do you do??? i am in manchester myself just down in bramhall.

with regards to the caustics and sky portals at the windows???

if i keep the current setup, will i need to enable caustics on the sky portal object properties also???

or i was thinkin to just use an omni above the water with diffuse unchecked, and having that as the caustic generator rather than the daylight system???

johnvid

Dont work for cadassist by any chance you should have a hotline right to Autodesk, but perhaps this forum is a little different.

I didnt realise you where trying this with mental ray... as the image sample was vray....its a long time since i used MR, but yeah the omni above the pool might be the easiest method

mattclinch

plain old spot with rectangular 'cone' is how i have done it in the past.

__________________
Matt Clinch
Arch Viz Artist @ Hayes Davidson
http://www.hayesdavidson.com

daveb867

cheers matt but i wanna keep the daylight system in there providing the scene illumination.

john, funnily enough i do work for cadassist. u been their before for training or is that who you get your software from

and yes we do have a direct line to autodesk which is handy, but getting an answer is difficult. we usually have to wait until they put training on for us, for new software releases etc before we actually get to speak to anyone

mattclinch

you can still have your daylight system doing the scene illumination, then just use light projectors in spots to fire caustic light patterns at the ceiling/floor/wall/towel rail/ipod/bikini clad lady etc.

__________________
Matt Clinch
Arch Viz Artist @ Hayes Davidson
http://www.hayesdavidson.com

John Dollus

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~kand/caustics/

caustics generator - one of my all time favorites but then I used to live and breathe pools for a bit.

daveb867

cheers for that link, do you have any example renders of work you have done using this program??

and also what is the workflow for using it?

John Dollus

I don't think I have anything done with it since 2003... a lifetime ago.
Basically, you follow the above suggestions - use the generator to create your projection map by setting the background color to black.
I would change the defaults to about 128 subdivisions, 16x supersampling, a high resolution and then blur it more in photoshop afterward a bit or downsample to smooth it out.
most of the settings are pretty obvious - depth is the distance from the water surface to the receiving plane, amplitude is the amount of water surface disturbance, etc.
you can export out a tileable animation sequence to use for animations as well - lots of fun!