I've been getting quite a few questions on problems people are running into. So here's a little troubleshooting list if you're running into issues; 0. Use the Cycles render engine! 1. Make sure you have enabled an object as the 'Cast Caustics' object, with a proper glass, or refraction BSDF Shader material 2. Make sure you have enabled an object as the 'Receive Caustics' object. 3. Make sure you have enabled 'Shadow Caustics' on your light source. 4. Shade Smooth any object that you want to CAST caustics. Flat shading DOES NOT WORK! 5. Check if you have any conflicting addons enabled, such as the 'Photographer' add on. 6. Might be obvious, but please use Blender version 3.2 (stable) available here; www.blender.org/download/ Hope this helps with some of the more common issues! Feel free to expand with your own troubleshooting points so people can see your solution. They may be facing the same issues!
I'm on 3.3.1 and followed every suggestion here, but it simply doesn't work. I just get the bland and smooth old version. No details at all. I hope they quickly transition cycles to a physical light renderer, so stuff like caustics work automatically.
Nice tutorial! 2:28 One thing i would suggest is to enable "harden normals" in the bevel modifier options, and then enable auto smooth. That way you get a bit more accurate shading on the glass.
Sometimes when I did that with HOps having that ticked, it gave me shading issues... now I have to look at all the settings and see why. I've actually turned off hardened normals recently and add a weighted normal at the end...
I have no idea why people say that! It’s real in a sense, but it only works for shadows and doesn’t give you reflective and refractive caustics, sadly!
Hello from Italy! This is the best guide regardings caustics with Cycles in Blender! And just to put this on the read, i'm using v.3.3.2 and still working great. My liminal pools won't look the same!
Thank you! For underwater you'll also need some volume scattering though, so you can get nice underwater light shafts etc. I've got a video on creating underwater scenes specifically on my channel aswell. :-)
@@KaizenTutorials I love it! We did a part 1 to the feature Bull Shark and I did almost everything in Element creating a fake underwater scene. I wasn't a huge fan of how it turned out. I've spent a whole year learning Blender and doing more VFX than anything, so when we shoot Part 2 this summer, I'll be doing all the VFX in Houdini and Blender. Only final composites in Ae.
I'm on a newer not stable version and it's a lot easier because caustics are enabled by default. I've never needed to disable caustics because it actually makes stuff less noisy in my experience as it lets more light through stuff
Hi, @njdotson is probably speaking about Light Paths > Caustics > Reflective & Refractive. You see, Cycles has always *supported* some level of caustics, they just didn't work very well. In version 3.2, Blender got an extra Caustic feature based on "Manifold Next Event Estimation" (whatever that is). This feature enables a better handling of caustics for the render engine, the only catch is that you have to tell Cycles *what* light can produce these new caustics, what can cast them, and what receive them. This is what @Kaizen explain in 8:41, chapter: Enabling Caustics in Blender 3.2. Keep in mind that this new caustics depend on the previous caustics, so *you still need* to have Light Paths > Caustics > Refractive enabled. Edit: I forgot to mention, the new caustics *do* take a performance hit, so... try to just use when needed?
Great comment, this could very well be the issue. And everything you say is exactly right! Caustics are awesome but take LONG to render so be sparse with them! 🙌🏻
umm can somebody tell me why I can't get the caustics effect on my shadow, I've turned the caustics options but instead the shadow didn't even reflect the color that I applied on the glass. Nice tutorial btw definitely gonna watch your other vid 😁
Thanks! Have you made sure that everything is enabled properly? So that means; 1) you have a light with shadow caustics enabled in the light properties 2) you have a caustics object with shadow caustics enabled and a proper transmission shader (e.g. glass, refraction) 3) you have an object to catch the shadows, where you've enabled receive shadow caustics. Finally please make sure you have no conflicting addons like the 'photographer' addon enabled! Hope this helps.
FYI: shadow caustics don't work on Metal GPU yet. I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out why I couldn't find the controls, but the release notes held the answer!
Hey ! It drive me crazy rn, I meticulously follow your tutorial to get those beautiful ✨caustics✨ but nothing happens, neither with the glass nor the ocean. If I want to get an ounce of caustics I have to crank up my light up to 6 MW lol. Any idea why ? and what is your set-up to render this scene ?
I’ll add a pinned post with some quick troubleshooting. But for now I’d say; make sure you have shade smooth the object that casts the caustics. Also don’t use point light. Use like an area or spotlight. Hope that helps! My setup is; cpu ryzen 3700x, 32GB ram and RTX 3070Ti.
@@KaizenTutorials I'll try it right now and I'll keep an eye on this video for your pinned post ! Thank you for your answer in any case ! And what a setup aha I love it !
Thanks for that hint! I was going crazy searching for the reason why it didn't look similar to the tutorial. Setting it to 179° and then it works but also couldn't figure out why.
Have you tried everything mentioned in my pinned troubleshoot post? Usually it's one of those things. If not, let me know and I can have a look for you what might be going on!
Hello sir, I have a question if I may; You've said that one must shade the object smooth, not flat, now, what if I have a diamond, which is virtually perfectly sharp? Would this work? I haven't yet got the opportunity to try this in Cycles, but I've rendered diamonds in LuxCore, so that's why I'm wondering. Thank you by the way for your great tutorials, looking forward for your reply. :)
Thanks! That’s a good question; but yeah it would require smooth shading. You could fix it though by adding a subdivison surface set to simple and then give it a high resolution. This should make it still look good. But even easier. You can hit shade smooth and enable auto normals in the object data properties. Set the angle to an angle that works for the diamond and everything will still look flat, even though it is shaded ‘smooth’! 💪🏻
Well that's no fun :-( Have you made sure the textured plane either has receiver or cast shadow caustics enabled? And the other objects which you use to either cast or receive the caustics? And have you enabled caustics for the light you're using?
I tryed everething here and it doesn't work. Reseting Blender to default factory, Smooth, Auto Smooth, changing light paths, my normals are OK, Cycles... don't know why my shadows are "flat". Running Blender 4.0.2 - Win10 - Ryzen 5 1600, RTX 2060 12GB. Thank's for the tutorial! **** I figured out! My area light was too big. I think you could put this in your trobleshooting.
Hello there, Im really new in Blender and Im trying to follow the tutorial, I know that its difficult to explain something specially when you have some expertise on the matter, there are some things that u should explain before, like, I was trying to create the Mix shader with the shortcut, but it didnt work, because i didnt have Node Wrengler activated from the Add-ons, and now im having difficulties to see exactly the same result in your viewport I cannot see my model at all, I can see it in material preview mode but in render preview i can only see the background, looking in your viewport I can see that everytime that you tweak something there is something going on, so i figured out that I needed to change the Render Engine to Cycles in the Render Properties. I know that maybe your channel is focused on people who has used Blender in the past, but also youre explaning for people like me that hasnt touch the software before, I liked that you explain all the shortcuts for every step, so its just a tip for your future tutorials, Thanks for sharing!!!
Thanks for your extensive feedback! I think I did mention you need Node wrangler right? But i’ll keep in mind that I should maybe explain a little bit better. Important is that you also make sure you have smooth shading enabled for the object that casts the caustics. So right click and shade smooth. Thanks again for the feedback and glad you like the vid overall!
Oh my goodness, thank you so much for mentioning Cycles Carlos. I kept going back on what I was doing to fix it up. @Kaizen Tutorials - I'm also super new, and you mentioned node wrangler but from a newbie's point of view, I didn't know that that's the name of an add-on that I didn't have enabled. Was a super quick piece of info to find out with a Google search though. Aside from these little points so far, this video is SO helpful to a beginner and I'm learning a ton. Thank you so much!
@@KaizenTutorials yes it’s very strange. I think I must be doing something with setup incorrectly but Iv made the sample scene 2 times now and followed video.
i dunno whats going on with my blender because im missing the whole shading section that has the caustics in object properties, what could be the problem?
another masterpiece and i love it! So, whats your thoughts on new curve pen tool?..... for me, it is really beneficial as i can easily trace 3d logos and designs, as well as make camera follow path a bit more efficiently. Anyway, thnx for the guide and waiting to see your future masterpieces 😁 Btw, do you take tutorial suggestions?
Thanks a lot! Haven’t tried the new pen tool yet! But i will for sure and maybe make a vid with it if it’s interesting enough. And yes you can definitely suggest things. I cant promise ill do anything with it tutorial wise but always love to see suggestions!
@@KaizenTutorials great! i think showing it would be better (hopefully youtube doesnt consider it as spam) ruclips.net/video/LosOIFUJKu8/видео.html I tried making this using classic instancing method but the only issues i faced was there were gaps in between the displacement of needles and drop in fps. Recently, i saw one geonodes animation in reddit where the author made something similar pinart without facing any of the mentioned issues and entirely in geonodes. I think you can also make a similar pinart anim with geonodes as a tutorial if possible :)
Doesn't work for me. I activated the Shadow Caustics options for the light and Cast / Receive Caustics for the glass, the ocean and the receiving objects in their Object Propeties , but it doesn’t make any differerence.
Cycles is one of the render engine within Blender. You can select which one to use from the render properties tab on the right side. EEVEE is the default and is perfect for simpler stuff, but if you want realism you use cycles.
Yeah, it's conflicting with caustics. Don't know why. I've made a troubleshoot pinned comment containing the most frequent issues people run into. This is one of them!
Have you tried all the tips in the pinned comment? Also make sure you have a plane to catch the caustics! and make sure the water is set to shade smooth!
To improve render quality even more - disable shadow caustics and check out what Path Guiding is (available in Blender 3.4+) ;-) That way you will get REAL caustics! Real, but much slower to render xD
Hi! Shadow caustics are only available in Cycles. Are you in cycles? Both GPU and CPU work when in Cycles though :-). Also objects need smooth shading. So make sure to click any object and hit right click and 'shade smooth'. Good luck!
I'm not sure if that works + you'll be doubling calculation length since Blender needs to calculate both caustics and volumetrics, which both take long! I've got a video though where I create underwater god rays via a different way. Check it out here if you like; ruclips.net/video/njgnJWP96o8/видео.html
I'm not sure but it seems to work for meshes with emissive materials, I can't find anything to enable like you do with normal lights but it seems to work edit: actualy maybe it seems to be just simple colored shadows, I have a material that can fake caustics that look even better than the new ones so...
Yeah it's exactly that; shadow caustics. So not true caustics, just shadows. But they are realistic in a sense that they do respect geometry etc. So they're usually better than using shaders or gobos.
Im facing an issue. After did all the checks for shadow caustics, when i switch to rendered preview, blender keeps on crashing. Cant even render the scene, it just keeps on crashing. Any idea why?
Thank you for this tutorial, I came here because I had a problem but alas, didn't find the solution in the video. The problem is that if you place liquid inside the glass (wine, water, whatever) and enable caustics for that liquid, it doesn't work. Even if I set multiple bounces for transmition and transparency, the caustics work only on one level, if I have 2 levels (glass and liquid) shadows become opaque again where 2 materials meet. Which makes blender caustics useless for product rendering like wine beer and so on. a real shame. unless i am missing something?
No youre right and sadly there's no good solution. The main thing you can do is select a part of the object and apply the material you want instead of the glass. It's a bit of a hack but this can work to get something going. Then you only need to add a circular plane with the material to 'simulate' the face of the liquid. But yeah it's not perfect...
Well... yeah in Alpha it has been for sure. But... not a big fan of doing stuff with Alpha and/or Experimental builds. So I usually wait for a stable version to start telling people about these kinds of things!
You could get a heart model, then animate the scale. You could do this in geometry nodes. Then take a transform node, input a math node set to sine in the scale. Input a scene time node before that. Then take a math node in between set to multiply to define the speed and make it as fast as you want. If the scale up and down is to strong you can add a map range after the sine node, to get control over how much the heart scales up and down!
@@KaizenTutorials oh sorry, it works, but... "Loading render kernels" takes a long time (doesnt work) when rendering with OptiX Hope Blender fix it soon)
just a little bit slower explanation on the technical aspects of what you do inside the blender - would've been so helpful to me. but anyway, liked it a lot, thank you so much!
Please use "win" and "+" to zoom in on the screen. All viewers don't have 24" monitor. Zooming in will also help if someone is watching from a tablet or mobile. I understand you want viewers to practice with you, but it may not be possible every time. It is a request.
You videos are great, your "smile" @0:01 freaked me out, bruh. Imagine your audience naked (ok, that never helped me either, but I got jokes as a salve for the constructive criticism). Not like I don't smile like that too most of the time...
@@KaizenTutorials ha HA! Look at the stress around your eyes. I can't give the complete breakdown of the microexpressions of your face (part of body language analysis), but given you don't always look that stressed, compare your smiles and facial expressions across videos. Also as you get older you get at least 3 more OS upgrades. I had one at about 26, then 33 and 43. It's possible, like teenagers can't read ppl's faces at all for the most part, and think they know everything (I don't assert you are a teenager), as your brain matures you will see more and more of what's going on... This face I noticed right away, because it's so common with me too. Only you know exactly what was going on when you recorded the video, so I offer this only as a means of self discovery. Damn, never thought I'd write that phrase, "means of self discovery!" [update: Now that I think about it, I could never tell when my ex-wife, a former child actress was lying to me... my memory was better so I knew she lied weeks later when she forgot, because she would say mutually exclusive things, but I never knew which one was false... so even watching microexpressions is no guarantee on making only great life choices...] Thanks for your videos.
That's more like a fake caustics, some sort of masking shadows IMO. Way far to realism. When you take a look at other render engines it is a bit disappointing.
It is isn’t true caustics no. Just shadow caustics. It’s a big step up, but nonetheless engines such as luxcore have a serious advantage over it with true caustics
I've been getting quite a few questions on problems people are running into. So here's a little troubleshooting list if you're running into issues;
0. Use the Cycles render engine!
1. Make sure you have enabled an object as the 'Cast Caustics' object, with a proper glass, or refraction BSDF Shader material
2. Make sure you have enabled an object as the 'Receive Caustics' object.
3. Make sure you have enabled 'Shadow Caustics' on your light source.
4. Shade Smooth any object that you want to CAST caustics. Flat shading DOES NOT WORK!
5. Check if you have any conflicting addons enabled, such as the 'Photographer' add on.
6. Might be obvious, but please use Blender version 3.2 (stable) available here; www.blender.org/download/
Hope this helps with some of the more common issues! Feel free to expand with your own troubleshooting points so people can see your solution. They may be facing the same issues!
Thank you for .4... because it don't work without :)
Exactly!
A Subdivision Surface modifier made mine a lot better.
Yeah this can definitely also help! Great tip.
I'm on 3.3.1 and followed every suggestion here, but it simply doesn't work. I just get the bland and smooth old version. No details at all.
I hope they quickly transition cycles to a physical light renderer, so stuff like caustics work automatically.
Nice tutorial!
2:28 One thing i would suggest is to enable "harden normals" in the bevel modifier options, and then enable auto smooth. That way you get a bit more accurate shading on the glass.
Great tips! Thanks for sharing
Nice suggestion.... Thank you!
Sometimes when I did that with HOps having that ticked, it gave me shading issues... now I have to look at all the settings and see why. I've actually turned off hardened normals recently and add a weighted normal at the end...
This is amazing! I do a lot of glass product renders and have been waiting for caustics in Blender for ages! Thank you for showing us how to use it!
It is an amazing feature. Sadly it’s not TRUE caustics, but still pretty great 💪🏻 thanks for the kind words!
@@KaizenTutorials Wait, it's not real caustics??? Why do other people say it's real caustics?
I have no idea why people say that! It’s real in a sense, but it only works for shadows and doesn’t give you reflective and refractive caustics, sadly!
@@KaizenTutorials Owh, I see... Maybe in the future it can happen. :)
Definitely!
Really enjoy your videos. Great pace, clear and concise directions without skipping intermediate steps, and interesting and applicable content.
Thanks a lot! Motivational words 🙏🏻
Straight forward great content, great value, great pacing. Many thanks your subs will grow no doubt
Wow! That’s really great to hear. Thanks a lot! And yeah I hope so too ;-)
@@KaizenTutorials Oranje Boven
@@NebraskaJimmy haha altijd
Very happy I learned this, thank you so much
Glad it was helpful!
Thanks. Very useful tutorial.
Thank you, appreciate it!
Awsome tutorials in general, it seems that you read the Blender Documentation every night before to sleep, you know every milimeter of it. Congrats.
Haha I wish I had such dedication! But thanks, appreciate it.
Hello from Italy! This is the best guide regardings caustics with Cycles in Blender! And just to put this on the read, i'm using v.3.3.2 and still working great. My liminal pools won't look the same!
Grazie mille! Glad you like it :-)
Whoa!! Brilliant! I'm working on a shark movie later this year, and this process will help with the underwater shark animations. Love it!
Thank you! For underwater you'll also need some volume scattering though, so you can get nice underwater light shafts etc. I've got a video on creating underwater scenes specifically on my channel aswell. :-)
@@KaizenTutorials I love it! We did a part 1 to the feature Bull Shark and I did almost everything in Element creating a fake underwater scene. I wasn't a huge fan of how it turned out. I've spent a whole year learning Blender and doing more VFX than anything, so when we shoot Part 2 this summer, I'll be doing all the VFX in Houdini and Blender. Only final composites in Ae.
Super dope! Would love to see some of the behind the scenes stuff on it 🙌🏻
Yet another very cool update that I'm completely sure I'll have forgotten how to implement by the time I actually need it.
Luckily you can always come back here 😜
@@KaizenTutorials As long as I bookmark it cleverly.
Very easy to follow and informative. Thank you so much!!!!
Thanks a lot! Great to hear 🙏🏻
I really enjoyed the video. I've learned so much in just minutes. Thanks!
Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks a lot.
Very enjoyable tutorial! When I'm done playing around (which might take a while), I'll definitely check out other tutorials of yours!
Thanks, that’s great to hear!
I'm on a newer not stable version and it's a lot easier because caustics are enabled by default.
I've never needed to disable caustics because it actually makes stuff less noisy in my experience as it lets more light through stuff
Aah and what version might that be?
Hi, @njdotson is probably speaking about Light Paths > Caustics > Reflective & Refractive.
You see, Cycles has always *supported* some level of caustics, they just didn't work very well. In version 3.2, Blender got an extra Caustic feature based on "Manifold Next Event Estimation" (whatever that is). This feature enables a better handling of caustics for the render engine, the only catch is that you have to tell Cycles *what* light can produce these new caustics, what can cast them, and what receive them. This is what @Kaizen explain in 8:41, chapter: Enabling Caustics in Blender 3.2.
Keep in mind that this new caustics depend on the previous caustics, so *you still need* to have Light Paths > Caustics > Refractive enabled.
Edit: I forgot to mention, the new caustics *do* take a performance hit, so... try to just use when needed?
Great comment, this could very well be the issue. And everything you say is exactly right! Caustics are awesome but take LONG to render so be sparse with them! 🙌🏻
Really well done tutorial. Thank you for this. Saving...
You're welcome!
umm can somebody tell me why I can't get the caustics effect on my shadow, I've turned the caustics options but instead the shadow didn't even reflect the color that I applied on the glass. Nice tutorial btw definitely gonna watch your other vid 😁
Thanks! Have you made sure that everything is enabled properly? So that means; 1) you have a light with shadow caustics enabled in the light properties 2) you have a caustics object with shadow caustics enabled and a proper transmission shader (e.g. glass, refraction) 3) you have an object to catch the shadows, where you've enabled receive shadow caustics. Finally please make sure you have no conflicting addons like the 'photographer' addon enabled! Hope this helps.
@@KaizenTutorials i just discovered that i need to shade smooth on the object and amazingly the effect worked. thanks for the advice 😄
Ah yeah forgot about that, but it is important indeed!
@@dimitraihsan thanks a lot
Thank you. Great tutorial!!!
Glad you enjoyed it!
LOVE THIS
Thanks!
Wow.... Its cool... 🔥
Thanks a lot!
FYI: shadow caustics don't work on Metal GPU yet. I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out why I couldn't find the controls, but the release notes held the answer!
Glad you found out why, but sorry to hear Metal isn't supported yet. Hopefully it'll come soon!
Hey ! It drive me crazy rn, I meticulously follow your tutorial to get those beautiful ✨caustics✨ but nothing happens, neither with the glass nor the ocean. If I want to get an ounce of caustics I have to crank up my light up to 6 MW lol. Any idea why ? and what is your set-up to render this scene ?
I’ll add a pinned post with some quick troubleshooting. But for now I’d say; make sure you have shade smooth the object that casts the caustics. Also don’t use point light. Use like an area or spotlight. Hope that helps!
My setup is; cpu ryzen 3700x, 32GB ram and RTX 3070Ti.
@@KaizenTutorials I'll try it right now and I'll keep an eye on this video for your pinned post ! Thank you for your answer in any case !
And what a setup aha I love it !
I’ve been looking for features like this in blender. Turns out, I have to upgrade😅. Thank you for sharing! You are the best👍🏻
Haha upgrading is always a good thing! Thanks! 🤗
great video!
Thank you again Stefan! 🙏🏻
All cool but the Glass BSDF does have the Refraction BSDF inside of it, so you don't need to mix anything.
Aah ok I guess they changed that. Thanks for the update! 🙏🏻
in Blender 3.5 if youre using area lights, spread needs to be below 180
Good to know. Do you know why that is?
Thanks for that hint! I was going crazy searching for the reason why it didn't look similar to the tutorial. Setting it to 179° and then it works but also couldn't figure out why.
Question: Why the rendered image is quite different from my viewpoint, especially the light, the ocean and the shadow caustics?
I’m not sure! Maybe you’re in viewport shading vs rendered shading in the render?
Dankjewel :)
Graag gedaan! 👍🏻
I am getting cuastics for the glass but somehow not for the ocean. Is it something related to the angle/strength of the lighting?
Have you tried everything mentioned in my pinned troubleshoot post? Usually it's one of those things. If not, let me know and I can have a look for you what might be going on!
Hello sir, I have a question if I may;
You've said that one must shade the object smooth, not flat, now, what if I have a diamond, which is virtually perfectly sharp?
Would this work? I haven't yet got the opportunity to try this in Cycles, but I've rendered diamonds in LuxCore, so that's why I'm wondering.
Thank you by the way for your great tutorials, looking forward for your reply. :)
Thanks! That’s a good question; but yeah it would require smooth shading. You could fix it though by adding a subdivison surface set to simple and then give it a high resolution. This should make it still look good.
But even easier. You can hit shade smooth and enable auto normals in the object data properties. Set the angle to an angle that works for the diamond and everything will still look flat, even though it is shaded ‘smooth’! 💪🏻
Wow that is cool
Thanks!
keen to see it animated
It looks great! But it’s quite heavy to render. Around 3-5 min per frame. So didn’t want to render an animation haha
Thank you so much!!
You’re welcome!
mind blowing
Thank you!
Cool! Thanx!
It looks like you have a TV with an EEVEE shadow artifacts behind you. 😆😂
Haha I hope that’s a good thing!
What should I do if I am using an image with a emission for my light source? How would I turn on shadow caustics?
I don’t think they can do that to be honest.
@@KaizenTutorials All good Kaizen, thanks for replying! Have a good day!
Thanks, you too!
I followed all your steps but it did not came out like yours. I did not get that white fome like thing. Is it something to be done separately?
Which white foam thing do you mean? Also make sure to shade smooth any object in the scene and apply scale with CTRL+A. Maybe that helps!
Wavy like pattern or highlights, in my one it was complete blue. I'll try to make again.
@@incognito6452 the water is only very slightly blue! Most light is coming from a blue sky, just like with actual water!
My water caustics aren't working on my textured plane and I'm not sure why.
Well that's no fun :-( Have you made sure the textured plane either has receiver or cast shadow caustics enabled? And the other objects which you use to either cast or receive the caustics? And have you enabled caustics for the light you're using?
Hmm. Have you tried making the light alot brighter?
nice tut, very cool THX !!! is it possible to cast caustics using skytexture (Nishita) ?
As far as I know you can't enable caustics using the sky texture.
love your tutorials! plz make a environment nature scene tutorial
Thanks SAM! I’ll definitely take it into consideration
I tryed everething here and it doesn't work. Reseting Blender to default factory, Smooth, Auto Smooth, changing light paths, my normals are OK, Cycles... don't know why my shadows are "flat". Running Blender 4.0.2 - Win10 - Ryzen 5 1600, RTX 2060 12GB. Thank's for the tutorial! **** I figured out! My area light was too big. I think you could put this in your trobleshooting.
Thanks for sharing how you got your issue resolved! If people run into a similar issue they can now use your comment as a problem solver :-)
Not working.... still Black shadow
I tried 3.5 version
Weird... are you using Cycles?
Hello there, Im really new in Blender and Im trying to follow the tutorial, I know that its difficult to explain something specially when you have some expertise on the matter, there are some things that u should explain before, like, I was trying to create the Mix shader with the shortcut, but it didnt work, because i didnt have Node Wrengler activated from the Add-ons, and now im having difficulties to see exactly the same result in your viewport I cannot see my model at all, I can see it in material preview mode but in render preview i can only see the background, looking in your viewport I can see that everytime that you tweak something there is something going on, so i figured out that I needed to change the Render Engine to Cycles in the Render Properties.
I know that maybe your channel is focused on people who has used Blender in the past, but also youre explaning for people like me that hasnt touch the software before, I liked that you explain all the shortcuts for every step, so its just a tip for your future tutorials, Thanks for sharing!!!
Thanks for your extensive feedback! I think I did mention you need Node wrangler right? But i’ll keep in mind that I should maybe explain a little bit better.
Important is that you also make sure you have smooth shading enabled for the object that casts the caustics. So right click and shade smooth.
Thanks again for the feedback and glad you like the vid overall!
Oh my goodness, thank you so much for mentioning Cycles Carlos. I kept going back on what I was doing to fix it up. @Kaizen Tutorials - I'm also super new, and you mentioned node wrangler but from a newbie's point of view, I didn't know that that's the name of an add-on that I didn't have enabled. Was a super quick piece of info to find out with a Google search though. Aside from these little points so far, this video is SO helpful to a beginner and I'm learning a ton. Thank you so much!
Appreciate the feedback! And great to hear you like the video. 🙌🏻🙏🏻
Crazy
Like, good crazy right? 😜
Where is the link to that IOR list?
Think I accidentally removed when I updated all my descriptions a while back. It’s in there again now though! But it’s; pixelandpoly.com/ior.html
Thanks!
nice tutorial
thanks
I tried the same what you did but i didn't get the pattern you got, I got caustics but not the nice pattern of the water
Hmm maybe you didn’t turn on smooth shading? Or maybe you need bigger ripples in the water? Not sure though!
be sure to mark "receive shadow caustics'' to a plane which is under the ''water plane''. works for me in blender 3.3. Looks great!
Still cant get it working
Weird! You are in cycles?
@@KaizenTutorials yes it’s very strange. I think I must be doing something with setup incorrectly but Iv made the sample scene 2 times now and followed video.
i dunno whats going on with my blender because im missing the whole shading section that has the caustics in object properties, what could be the problem?
Perhaps you have an addon causing problems or you need to reinstall Blender.
@@justsomeguy1074 i highly doubt its the addons, tho ill try reinstalling it again
What version of Blender are you using? Are you in the latest stable version 3.2?
@@KaizenTutorials i'm using the stable version
Hmm that’s weird… it should be there in Blender 3.2…. Not sure what the issue could be then 😩
Turning on shadow caustics for the light actually removes the transmission of light through the object. How do I tackle that ?
I'm afraid the solution will be to do caustics properly and take the hit in rendertime...
@@KaizenTutorials i found the problem to be some values. Now its working well. Thank you for the tutorial 😀
another masterpiece and i love it!
So, whats your thoughts on new curve pen tool?..... for me, it is really beneficial as i can easily trace 3d logos and designs, as well as make camera follow path a bit more efficiently. Anyway, thnx for the guide and waiting to see your future masterpieces 😁
Btw, do you take tutorial suggestions?
Thanks a lot! Haven’t tried the new pen tool yet! But i will for sure and maybe make a vid with it if it’s interesting enough. And yes you can definitely suggest things. I cant promise ill do anything with it tutorial wise but always love to see suggestions!
@@KaizenTutorials great! i think showing it would be better (hopefully youtube doesnt consider it as spam)
ruclips.net/video/LosOIFUJKu8/видео.html
I tried making this using classic instancing method but the only issues i faced was there were gaps in between the displacement of needles and drop in fps. Recently, i saw one geonodes animation in reddit where the author made something similar pinart without facing any of the mentioned issues and entirely in geonodes. I think you can also make a similar pinart anim with geonodes as a tutorial if possible :)
Doesn't work for me. I activated the Shadow Caustics options for the light and Cast / Receive Caustics for the glass, the ocean and the receiving objects in their Object Propeties , but it doesn’t make any differerence.
That’s weird! I’ve heard several people say that some addons conflict with it. Specially the ‘photographer’ add on. So maybe that could be it…
@@KaizenTutorials No, I don't own Photographer or similar addons.
You can also try increasing the light strength a lot!
@@KaizenTutorials I know. It's at least working in your file from Gumroad. There must be something I miss in my own file.
Super strange… but thanks for purchasing the project file!
When I click on shading and add glass bsdf, the glass turns invisible. Do you have a solution for this?
Do you have lights in your scene? Are you using Cycles? Are you sure you're not accidentally using a Transparent BSDF?
@@KaizenTutorials I have one light in the scene. I am not using Cycles and I do not think I use a Transparent BSDF.
@@laseajani3005 well than not using Cycles is the issue :-) glass only properly works in Cycles!
@@KaizenTutorials What are cycles?
Cycles is one of the render engine within Blender. You can select which one to use from the render properties tab on the right side. EEVEE is the default and is perfect for simpler stuff, but if you want realism you use cycles.
why i have no cast caustics option at my lights ??? can't find answer anywhere!
if anyone wanna know: it was Photographer addon.. -_-
Yeah, it's conflicting with caustics. Don't know why. I've made a troubleshoot pinned comment containing the most frequent issues people run into. This is one of them!
The ocean isn't showing probably in my render view, great tutorial btw
Have you tried all the tips in the pinned comment? Also make sure you have a plane to catch the caustics! and make sure the water is set to shade smooth!
To improve render quality even more - disable shadow caustics and check out what Path Guiding is (available in Blender 3.4+) ;-)
That way you will get REAL caustics!
Real, but much slower to render xD
Haha yeah you can get proper caustics but they are very very slow indeed
Awesome ⭐⭐⭐😇
Thank you!
My light propeties don't show the Shadow Caustic Checklist. Need help, I render with CPU, download Latest 3.2.0 Blender.
Hi! Shadow caustics are only available in Cycles. Are you in cycles? Both GPU and CPU work when in Cycles though :-). Also objects need smooth shading. So make sure to click any object and hit right click and 'shade smooth'. Good luck!
i had the same problem. the photographer add on is blocking the caustics option on all the lights.check your add ons :)
@@toxicmonkey2006 Whoa! it's perfect explanation. Thank you, now it's working. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I love you!
@@farrasaris5394 Haha great, glad that i could help.
eevee or cycles ?
Cycles only!
Bro, if I enable caustics option for light, it is not working....
Are you in Cycles? You need to enable both caustics for the light, the receiver and then it should work.
I have both Blender 3.2 and 3.3 but I don't have those options for caustics neither in lights tab nor in object properties.
That’s weird! You sure you’re using stable builds?
@@KaizenTutorials I made a huge mistake. I have the light selected that's why I did not find caustics in object properties.
@@gabri3ltz ooh okay! So you got it fixed 👍🏻💪🏻
@@KaizenTutorials Yes, thank you! I'm glad that Blender finally got some sort of caustics in cycles.
Does any one now? if you can combine this with a volume Scatter in order to get caustic god ray? thank you
I'm not sure if that works + you'll be doubling calculation length since Blender needs to calculate both caustics and volumetrics, which both take long! I've got a video though where I create underwater god rays via a different way. Check it out here if you like; ruclips.net/video/njgnJWP96o8/видео.html
is this working in blender3.5 ??
As far as I know, yes?
It seems like caustics only work with cpu in cycles in my m1 mac. -.-
Yeah this is a known issue. Metal GPU's have limited support in Blender. Hopefully one day that will change for the better!
Is this in 3.5 ?
Yes it is! Just make sure you're in Cycles.
I'm not sure but it seems to work for meshes with emissive materials, I can't find anything to enable like you do with normal lights but it seems to work
edit: actualy maybe it seems to be just simple colored shadows, I have a material that can fake caustics that look even better than the new ones so...
Yeah it's exactly that; shadow caustics. So not true caustics, just shadows. But they are realistic in a sense that they do respect geometry etc. So they're usually better than using shaders or gobos.
water caustics 👍👍👍
Thanks!
few strange when I used a box to instead, the shadow is solid with out caustics. why ?
Sorry I’m not sure I understand completely. But the caustics don’t work on objects with flat shading so make sure to right click and shade smooth.
@@KaizenTutorials yes, normal - auto smooth works . flat surface don't work with caustics, but shows a more correct trans. shadow effect :)
Im facing an issue. After did all the checks for shadow caustics, when i switch to rendered preview, blender keeps on crashing. Cant even render the scene, it just keeps on crashing. Any idea why?
What version are you using? This could be a GPU issue. Maybe you’re running out of GPU memory. Try changing to CPU rendering and see if that works!
@@KaizenTutorials blender 3.3. I'm using asus tuf laptop, 8 gigs of ram with rtx 3050 in it, if that helps
good
Thanks!
Thank you for this tutorial, I came here because I had a problem but alas, didn't find the solution in the video.
The problem is that if you place liquid inside the glass (wine, water, whatever) and enable caustics for that liquid, it doesn't work.
Even if I set multiple bounces for transmition and transparency, the caustics work only on one level, if I have 2 levels (glass and liquid) shadows become opaque again where 2 materials meet.
Which makes blender caustics useless for product rendering like wine beer and so on. a real shame. unless i am missing something?
No youre right and sadly there's no good solution. The main thing you can do is select a part of the object and apply the material you want instead of the glass. It's a bit of a hack but this can work to get something going. Then you only need to add a circular plane with the material to 'simulate' the face of the liquid. But yeah it's not perfect...
@KaizenTutorials Thanks for replying, though I am not sure I follow you with the hack thing lol. Thank you regardless :)
How to enable it for HDRi lighting?
You can’t as far as I know :-(
Mines didn't work and I have basica;lly the same specs as you, only I have an RTX 3090 in my PC, yet it kept breaking my blender
That's strange... are you sure you're using GPU within Cycles though?
@@KaizenTutorials Yeah, I changed the Preferences for the GPU render from OptiX to CUDA and it works, did you use CUDA in your video?
I did not, I always use Optix. But it might just be a driver issue or whatever! Either way you got it to work right? 💪🏻
@@KaizenTutorials Worked well, I guess it's just an Nvidia Driver issue
it doesnt work for me
Sorry to hear that; have you tried all the options mentioned in the pinned comment? There's a troubleshooting list there!
It has been here for a month though right?
Well... yeah in Alpha it has been for sure. But... not a big fan of doing stuff with Alpha and/or Experimental builds. So I usually wait for a stable version to start telling people about these kinds of things!
@@KaizenTutorials that's understandable
I'm remembering the days where maya's mental ray had real cuastics.
Hopefully they'll all have it in the nearby future!
How to do heartbeat in a blender?
In one day 😍😍please help me, sir.
You could get a heart model, then animate the scale. You could do this in geometry nodes. Then take a transform node, input a math node set to sine in the scale. Input a scene time node before that. Then take a math node in between set to multiply to define the speed and make it as fast as you want. If the scale up and down is to strong you can add a map range after the sine node, to get control over how much the heart scales up and down!
my blender 3,2 not caustics
Make sure you're using the latest stable build (3.4.1) and more importantly make sure you're using Cycles! Caustics don't work in EEVEE.
3.2 - Doesnt work for me((
In what sense?
@@KaizenTutorials oh sorry, it works, but... "Loading render kernels" takes a long time (doesnt work) when rendering with OptiX
Hope Blender fix it soon)
Ah ok! Well glad you found the solution 🙌🏻
@@KaizenTutorials thank you for your video)
so are you using cuda ? in my viewport it doesnt show caustic at all with cuda or optix
just a little bit slower explanation on the technical aspects of what you do inside the blender - would've been so helpful to me.
but anyway, liked it a lot, thank you so much!
Thanks for the tip! I'll take it into consideration for future videos. Glad to hear you liked the video though :-)
guys, i have found a new toy, i'd be gone for a few days, dont report me missing, im just in my room oka bye!
Haha, so after how long should we get worried though? 😜
@@KaizenTutorials only Abt a few yrs (already did 3 renders so far)
😂
Please use "win" and "+" to zoom in on the screen. All viewers don't have 24" monitor. Zooming in will also help if someone is watching from a tablet or mobile. I understand you want viewers to practice with you, but it may not be possible every time. It is a request.
Noted, I'll take it into consideration for future videos!
I like u bro
I like u too bro
purchased on gumroad
Thanks a lot!
bro make product animation in blender
Thinking about it! 💪🏻
new sub from me .:)
Appreciate it! Welcome to the club.
@@KaizenTutorials your welcome
You videos are great, your "smile" @0:01 freaked me out, bruh. Imagine your audience naked (ok, that never helped me either, but I got jokes as a salve for the constructive criticism). Not like I don't smile like that too most of the time...
lol! I thought it was a pretty genuine smile 😂
@@KaizenTutorials ha HA! Look at the stress around your eyes. I can't give the complete breakdown of the microexpressions of your face (part of body language analysis), but given you don't always look that stressed, compare your smiles and facial expressions across videos.
Also as you get older you get at least 3 more OS upgrades. I had one at about 26, then 33 and 43. It's possible, like teenagers can't read ppl's faces at all for the most part, and think they know everything (I don't assert you are a teenager), as your brain matures you will see more and more of what's going on...
This face I noticed right away, because it's so common with me too. Only you know exactly what was going on when you recorded the video, so I offer this only as a means of self discovery.
Damn, never thought I'd write that phrase, "means of self discovery!"
[update: Now that I think about it, I could never tell when my ex-wife, a former child actress was lying to me... my memory was better so I knew she lied weeks later when she forgot, because she would say mutually exclusive things, but I never knew which one was false... so even watching microexpressions is no guarantee on making only great life choices...]
Thanks for your videos.
That's more like a fake caustics, some sort of masking shadows IMO. Way far to realism. When you take a look at other render engines it is a bit disappointing.
It is isn’t true caustics no. Just shadow caustics. It’s a big step up, but nonetheless engines such as luxcore have a serious advantage over it with true caustics
dude you are so verbose... JUST GET TO THE POINT. quit doing these theatricals.
🤷