Quote - Carrara can do caustics...  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQcD590XhiY

 

Yeah, a quick look at the Carrara feature list also indicates that.

Rendering Options - Achieve a new level of realism in your scenes with Soft Shadows, Blurred Reflections, Blurred Transmission, True Ambient Lighting, Caustics, Global Illumination, Ambient Occlusion, HDRI, Motion Blur, Subsurface Scattering, Shadow Catch, Transparency with Absorption, Depth of Field, and more

I worked with Carrara for about 2 months on a collaboration project, and found the renderer quite capable.  Certainly not as deep as something like Vray, but above average.

I think pretty much any Physics-based raytrace engine these days supports some form of Caustics rendering.  It will add a bit of calculation time to the scene, depending on how many materials you have that will generate caustics.  If you don't need caustics, you don't have to use them.

Unbiased engines like Luxrender will render them automatically, without having to worry to much about photon map settings, if it detects refractive materials in the scene, like glass, water, etc.  Other engines require you to enable caustics, and manually set photon mapping parameters for them to work.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.