I am trying to apply the caustic FX to an animatiom Im playing with.
The caustics work great for the stills, but when I try to render the animation I get a weird problem with the caustics.
I use the basic seting from the tutorial, with 4 cristal colored boxes 1 light and all inside one box.
The colored caustics seem to move like crazy, even when everything is not moving.
if you have time, you could see the movie here:
http://www.agvideo.tv/caustictest.mov

Hi, I don't have time to trouble shoot this one today but there are two things to try: 1) Increase the Caustics filter size. It increases the fidelity of the caustics. I suspect that the lower/default caustic setting is allowing the jitter. This will increase render time though. 2) For the cube shapes, you're really not gaining anything by using caustics because of the flat sides - a curved shape would be different. Simply selecting light through transparency should be ok. If you want a caustic look, you can also create a gel for a light within the cubes. You can get all of the look with none of the speed penalty on render. Mark

Attached Link: http://www.agvideo.tv/caustictest2.mov

Well I try another test. This time is an clear cristal shader sphere inside a box, with 2 lights. the problem is still there, less notorius when the camera move, but you could see the caustics aura shaking when the motion stop. Now I wonder if this is a normal behavior for the caustics. You could see the mov (681k) and the seting for the render, in my first seting I use photon count of 40000 and the filter size in 10, now I change to 65211 and 65.

I rendered a similar scene with the Carrara 3 Beta and also had a flicker. It was not as noticable but was still there. I'll present it to the Eovia team and see if we can get an answer. Your web site is a great fun! Mark

aolba, Engineering at Eovia indicated that a bug has been filed for this but they're not sure it's actually a bug and haven't had time to check it out yet. Some other bugs took priority. Their suggestion was to continue increasing photon count and filter quality until it get's to where you need it.

Thank you for you opinion about our web site.

I see.
But this bug happend in version 2 and with your beta version too?
I see an animation in "litst" web site ( http://www.chez.com/litst/eng/home.htm ) about some ice cubes with phisic applied and caustics. Maybe becouse the camera is not very close to the object I cant see any problem with his animation. Thats way I try something like this.

I will be making more test by myself or untill some answer to this problem show up.

Thank you for give some of your time to this post.