Well, last night I just had this idea, so I ran up to my attic with a small desk lamp, a bag of those glass beads that you put in vases to hold flowers still and an old metal sided box, I spread the beads out on the box and the floor around it, turned off all the lights, stirred up some dust and turned the desklamp on. I studied the way the light reacted with the dust, and with the metal, and of course the glass. I then went to bryce with my idea and created this. This image uses one volumetric spotlight with slightly soft shadows on. But, when I rendered it with this I saw that bryce's caustics were... ugly, they didn't work well at all. so, I modified one of the spheres and added an omni light with squared falloff and linked it to the sphere, with the sphere as it's parent, I then moved this omni light away from the sphere along the ground plane untill it rested in the center of the shadow, this created the caustics effect I wanted. I applied a slight slight gel map to go with the bump on the glass and multireplicated, after that it was pretty easy. I just moved the omni further away for spheres that were further right in the scene and less for objects left in the scene. All the omni lights were set to not cast shadows. I then created a square spotlight and applied the copper color with a slight gell bump and placed it alongside the copper box to create those caustics, this again was also set to not cast shadows. You will notice that in the sphere's in the line of sight to this side of the box where the light would reflect I have added a secondary coppre colored omni on the other side of the spheres, but not a shadow. The intensity on this was lessened. The caustics of the torus were done by creating a positive spotlight (non shadow casting) and then a negative spotlight of the same intensity inside it (but smaller) this created the appropriate ring effect when a small gel was applied. (not sure if this is what the caustics of a torus would look like, because I didn't have a torus lying around to test it with. The glow was done in photoshop using a secondary 'lighten' layer. Anyway, hope you enjoy, I'll probably do a gallery image based on this concept, but I didn't think this one looked finished enough.

Oh yeah, rendering was done at default with AA. Rendertime was 16 hours, it was rendered at double THIS size, 4000 by 3000 appr. The scene took 2 hours to create, not including the real life studying. I think I came pretty close to how it looks, but I'll let you guys be the judges.

This judge thinks it's amazing. How do you get rid of the softshadow artefacts at normal (non-premium) rendering modes?

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Blur in photoshop, that's one of the touchups.

Oops forgot, plus, remember it was rendered at double this resolution, and by blur I mean the blur brush not scene blur.

Here was my original test render without my method.

quite amazing. Prepare to be pestered about the details in the IRC room :) S.

Way too large for the forum... But really great technique!

Very cool results from your latest experiment.

This image is astounding!

Well this one just finished, it's not that great for how long it took, I studied the glass beads more to see that there was a volumous look to the caustics, so I tried to reproduce that here. I also looked at some physics pictures online to try to get it perfect. So be kind, this took 4 hours to render. and uses 145 lights. 4 spotlights 1 cylinder and a farking wack of metaballs.-

You can compare it to the base render of this without any of my caustics attempts a few replies up.

OMG! these are beautiful!!!!

Great job! Zoom in on the volumetric light thingy...i wanna see it up close :)

How the F*** did you make that volumetric caustic thingy? How about some screenshots of the wirdframe and lightsettings and a basic explaination of how it was constructed? or in short, how about a tut? :) I want to see it close-up too.

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Ok, here's a sideview of the wireframe, I had to scale everything way down so you could see it. You see in order for the falloff to work without acting as a light itself, the scene has to be gaigantic. But anyway, it's pretty self explainatory, I used volumetric gel maps on all the lights, the postwork was done in photoshop ot make it glow more. And atm I am being lambasted for not purchasing snagit, so ignore that please.

I am rendering a more complex image atm, i'll probably start a new post though, so look for that tonight.

Lol...you have way more patience than me. I wonder if a volume material might work instead of all those volume radials..might be good for a few lens flare effects.

Very cool...

Nice work Ornlu... As you probably already know, 4000 x 3000 is Imax resolution. So I've gotta give you extra credit for that. Infact, Im rendering something along the same lines now. I've also done quite a few volumetric images (check gallery). This new has been going for over 24 hours now.. I'll upload it when its done.. whenever that is.. lol.. But yes, great study work.

Looks great.