Like before, first the images (just rendered to SL10):
First of all, caustics are fake.
In the images I mixed two identical meshes (plane subdivided and with some noise) not placed exactly at the same position. The first one has a real water mxm and is hidden to GI; this one alone would give a very clear water with refraction, and shadows but no caustics. It looks great if you don't want to fake the caustics. Works nice and fast for lights inside and outside of the pool.
The second mesh is added just to create something similar to caustics. It is hidden to camera/reflections/refractions. I used this material:
http://www.ftella.com/links/Fake_caustics.zip
It basically makes a bit more opaque the parts which are not the "caustics lines". The cool thing is that it projects the lines over the bottom of the pool and every object inside it and the projection depends on the position of the light source. If the lights are inside the pool it projects "fake caustics" outside. The caustics lines are not very strong though.
Maybe this will get old with 2.0 but will help till it comes.
This is another image with Geret's map:
I also tried using a real water mxm in the second mesh but it didn't show the caustics.
)
) is a volume duplicated (or maybe I modeled each piece of glass and bevels, can't remember). In the case of the water, the surface is just a plane duplicated as the volume is not needed.
- By hwolfejr
- By choo-chee