Pool water with caustics

ledisnomad

I don't render pool water very often, but every time I do, it takes me forever to figure out how to get the caustics to work. I go through all the settings, search for all the tutorials.

I just started another project with a pool and I'm going to want a rendering with awesome pool water caustics.

Here's what I'm doing:

Creating a plane that is the surface of the water and making it a component.
Applying a water material to the component and to both faces of the plane.
Adding a displacement geometry modifier to the component - I use the same noise map from the water Bump channel for the displacement.
In the water material Refraction Advanced Settings, uncheck "Affect Shadows".
In the render settings Global Illumination Advanced Settings, turn on "Photon Mapped Caustics".

What am I missing? You'll see in the image that the displacement is working at least.

rv1974

If it was in Max, I'd say it's Photon radius in Sun settings. Just repeate some of YT tutorials

freebs

@ledisnomad said:

I don't render pool water very often, but every time I do, it takes me forever to figure out how to get the caustics to work. I go through all the settings, search for all the tutorials.

I just started another project with a pool and I'm going to want a rendering with awesome pool water caustics.

Here's what I'm doing:

Creating a plane that is the surface of the water and making it a component.

Applying a water material to the component and to both faces of the plane.

Adding a displacement geometry modifier to the component - I use the same noise map from the water Bump channel for the displacement.

In the water material Refraction Advanced Settings, uncheck "Affect Shadows".

In the render settings Global Illumination Advanced Settings, turn on "Photon Mapped Caustics".

What am I missing? You'll see in the image that the displacement is working at least.
[attachment=0:2gykd0yy]pool.jpg[/attachment:2gykd0yy]

I think you also need to be in CPU mode for the caustics to work.