Just playing with lights. Saw the "A Study in Scotch" in the C gallery and thought I'd mess around with caustic refractions too. (BTW, nice work 5055357) I think I need more time to play with this stuff..... All textures are stock from the Carrara CD as is the stethescope. The ashtray is a stock metaball object from the object tray that was converted to a vertex object and tweaked a little.

Intruiginng image. Not being a Carrara user (Ray Dream Studio 5, that's me), I don't know what caustic refractions are. Enlighten me?

Caustics refers to the light bending lens quality of glass and liquids. Carrara does not support that at this time. The work around for that is to create some gels and apply them to lights in appropriate places as in the example above. If I had any spare time today I'd tweak the gel that's inside the glass for a better rim refraction but I've gotta pay the bills. :*0 Other uses would be underwater scenes, and any scene where there is glass type of objects. Some of the pixel pushers with programs that have caustics still create gel/light set-ups to avoid speed hits in rendering plus complete control over the caustics themselves. (there are times that you may not want them everywhere) Pretty fun stuff. Mark

Ah. I knew there was a reason I opted for a more "cartoon" approach in my work. ;)

Did I miss something? Is there a good tutorial for this?

Hi jrsamples, What do you want to know that is not shown in the image above? I'll try to fill in the blanks. Mark

cool technique Mark. Im gonna play with that. - Dave www.citizendave.com