Chaos Corona for Cinema 4D > [C4D] I need help!

Problem Water droplets Caustics effect

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tennet:
Hi,

I am trying to achieve a pretty classic water droplet effect using caustics in C4D "Corona Renderer Version: 8 (DailyBuild Feb  2 2022)". I only get very dark render results compared to the real world references. See my attached examples.

My water droplet mesh is 4,5mm in height and the small water puddles are only like 0,3mm thick (extruded above the floor). I have applied a basic water material with 'Caustics Slow' enabled (under refractions). I have tried with and without 'Volumetrics' enabled (played around with many different settings), but no luck.. I have tried many different light setups, like the 'Corona Sun', Corona Area lights and HDR lighting (HDR gradients on a plane).

Any tips or ideas on how I can achieve these real-world water droplet results? Hope someone can help, many thanks!

(Attached is also my test scene so you can test for yourself)

Beanzvision:
Hi there,

I had issues with your lighting so I had to replace it. I also added some noise to the surface of the drops. Nothing is smooth in this world ;) Surface imperfections will help create interesting caustic patterns.

tennet:
Hi, many thanks for looking into the scene. The lighting in the scene works here, maybe the HDR was missing in the uploaded scene.. but did you adjust anything in the materials or mesh (or render settings)? Two of your water puddles still look dark, but the one in the top looks a bit brighter. Are there any differencies?

The effect I often see with water drops on a surface (that I’d like to recreate) is that they tend to look brigther on the inside (not refering to the caustics here). At least the color of the floor(inside the droplet) should be as bright as the original, specially in such small water drops?

If I disable caustics in the material then it gets brighter, but then I loose all the real-world effects instead.

Any ideas?

pokoy:
The light blue example looks like it could've been photoshopped.
The other two have one big difference wrt to your setup - a reflective surface that reflects the environment. If you're going for exactly the same effect, try to set up your scene in a way that mimics the source as closely as possible, only then can you really tell if it's a problem with the renderer.
Also, I'd always be careful with examples from stock image libraries. They're often photoshopped or have heavy post production, it's much more reliable to shoot something for yourself, that way you can also tell what the lighting/setup looked like exactly.

tennet:
Hi pokoy! Definately a good point, my references from google can of course have been retouched, so I should compare this with my own photos and my real world lighting setups.. will do!

But at the same time I choose photos that looked right to me. I may be wrong, but I have done lots of photo retouching of beverages in my work, so I believe I have some understanding of how droplets and liquids should look, and no matter how strong I crank up my Corona lighting, these very thin water puddles/droplets never get any brighter. And that seems wrong, doesn’t it?

I will try to photo some droplets and experiment some more in Corona. Will update my post!

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