Caustics playground!

[rowmanns]

Hi,

Do these blocks show up as a NaN when you use the pixel probe on it? (right click in the VFB)

Secondly, does this only happen in the caustics pass, or are the visible in the beauty too?

Your scene would really be the best way for us to debug it. Are you able to strip down the scene to a point where the issue still occurs? We are also able to treat the scene confidentially.

Thanks,

Rowan

[XRef]

The blocks do not show up as NaN, and yes the issue is only in the caustics pass. I have uploaded the scene for you to inspect, thanks!!

1581356575_Caustics-Black-issue.zip

[rowmanns]

Hi,

Thanks for the scene. We can reproduce the issue here and I'll send it over to the dev team.

Cheers,

Rowan

(Internal ID=460381847)

[alexyork]

For anyone who might be interested, we just published a big project all about caustics!

https://www.recentspaces.com/lathampools

Testament, I think, to how awesome they work in Corona. We're really excited to see the new changes in caustics and PhoenixFD/foam too, in v6.

[Nejc Kilar]

For anyone who might be interested, we just published a big project all about caustics!

https://www.recentspaces.com/lathampools

Testament, I think, to how awesome they work in Corona. We're really excited to see the new changes in caustics and PhoenixFD/foam too, in v6.

Marvelous work, really came out great! I do wonder, if you don't mind me asking, did you have them render in the beauty pass or did you compose it on top linear style?

The thing is, for production scenes where the caustics can get trickier than a single light shining through a glass I sometimes need to do 50000 passes to get it to clear. It's like an exponential curve.

Sorry for the offtopic :P

[alexyork]

For anyone who might be interested, we just published a big project all about caustics!

https://www.recentspaces.com/lathampools

Testament, I think, to how awesome they work in Corona. We're really excited to see the new changes in caustics and PhoenixFD/foam too, in v6.

Marvelous work, really came out great! I do wonder, if you don't mind me asking, did you have them render in the beauty pass or did you compose it on top linear style?

The thing is, for production scenes where the caustics can get trickier than a single light shining through a glass I sometimes need to do 50000 passes to get it to clear. It's like an exponential curve.

Sorry for the offtopic :P

Thanks :) All in the beauty pass. 50000 passes is madness. Probably just 150-200 or so needed for most of these. Maybe less for certain scenes. The key is to use them wisely and in scenes where they're really needed and not going to cause issues elsewhere. Once we have a working include-exclude for caustics (being received) it will make a world of difference.

[Giona]

For anyone who might be interested, we just published a big project all about caustics!

https://www.recentspaces.com/lathampools

Testament, I think, to how awesome they work in Corona. We're really excited to see the new changes in caustics and PhoenixFD/foam too, in v6.

Amazing images!
Did you tweaked the shaders in some way to optimize the computation/remove unwanted fireflies?

[alexyork]

For anyone who might be interested, we just published a big project all about caustics!

https://www.recentspaces.com/lathampools

Testament, I think, to how awesome they work in Corona. We're really excited to see the new changes in caustics and PhoenixFD/foam too, in v6.

Amazing images!
Did you tweaked the shaders in some way to optimize the computation/remove unwanted fireflies?

Cheers. Not really, no. Most of the work was involved with testing different displacement settings to get the caustics to read how we wanted. i.e. strength, scale, detail level etc.

[Nejc Kilar]

For anyone who might be interested, we just published a big project all about caustics!

https://www.recentspaces.com/lathampools

Testament, I think, to how awesome they work in Corona. We're really excited to see the new changes in caustics and PhoenixFD/foam too, in v6.

Marvelous work, really came out great! I do wonder, if you don't mind me asking, did you have them render in the beauty pass or did you compose it on top linear style?

The thing is, for production scenes where the caustics can get trickier than a single light shining through a glass I sometimes need to do 50000 passes to get it to clear. It's like an exponential curve.

Sorry for the offtopic :P

Thanks :) All in the beauty pass. 50000 passes is madness. Probably just 150-200 or so needed for most of these. Maybe less for certain scenes. The key is to use them wisely and in scenes where they're really needed and not going to cause issues elsewhere. Once we have a working include-exclude for caustics (being received) it will make a world of difference.

Huh, interesting! :) In the past I've also used the denoiser in a virtual beauty pass with cranked up settings so as to overlay that image on top where the caustics were at.

Oh and 50000 passes, that was a bit of a caricature of the situation. It was more like a 1000 really :)

Anyho, thanks for the reponse, it seems like it can be done! Thanks for the input!

[Juraj]

So hypnotizing :- )

[marchik]

and again, do you guys know the reason of that? 300 passes for the third time, i'm pretty tired

[TomG]

Best to start a new thread with a bug report, so it can be tracked, responded to etc. Those look like NaNs. When starting the new thread for a bug report (or submitting a ticket), we'd need to know host software, which version of host software, which version of Corona, are those really NaNs (right click on the dark squares in the VFB to see if they give a color value or if they say NaN), the scene would be good too so we can see the setup (can be sent by private uploader). Thanks!

[rowmanns]

Has anyone come across these black blocks in their caustics pass? (40 passes with default denoise)

Hi,

It looks like this was caused by some caustics optimisations.

We have a workaround for this now. For the time being you can disable the "Caustics Adaptivity" checkbox in the advanced caustics settings. We will carry on looking into this and try to find a more permenant solution.

This in present in the v6 DB from 2020-06-18 onwards.

Thanks,

Rowan

[maru]

P.S. you need to enable the devel / experimental rollout first - https://coronarenderer.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/12000021288

;)

[Neil Cross]

Hi

After installing rc5 black pixels are still appearing in the caustics pass. There's no option to disable caustics adaptivity. Any way to fix this?

Thanks