Alright, I figured out that for now I can manually refresh the photon map by reloading the desktop. And now it seems like my photon maps automatically refresh inconsistently whenever I make a change. Now I'm just lost and wondering if I should do a reinstall.
jsmack
McNistor's version is green/purple because the material has a colored opacity. Opacity is not typically used for glass materials, except for fake glass for real time renderers
The transmission color is the parameter used for tinting glass on the principled shader.
Is this a physically plausible effect? If not, what other sort of setting should I look for to make sure my materials are always behaving realistically?
jsmack
Try increasing the number of photons to around 10 million for a smoother result.
Did a low-sample render with 5 million photons, I'm already seeing improvements!
There's even some neat reflection caustics
What's the simplest way to reduce photon map generation times?
robsdesign
As mentioned above, you need a lot of photons to get good results and when you increase the photon count, you'll notice it takes a lot longer to calculate the photons & render. So as an example of increased photons, I've also included a Redshift version where I've cranked up the photon count by a lot. In theory, if you increased the settings enough, Mantra would achieve similar results.
Do you recommend that I switch from Mantra to Redshift? I hear that it's a lot faster but what will I be losing from Mantra if I do?
robsdesign
- I set the Photon target to just the glass. This means the photons aren't spread across the whole floor and are concentrated in the area you need. (the glass)
- I also disabled the Caustic light on the glass object, Geometry>Shading, as this speeds up the rendering by a lot. It takes around 6 minutes without and about 1 hour with it enabled. I may be incorrect but you really only need the Caustic light to be visible on the floor (or whatever the caustics are visible on) as it's an effect cast through/from the glass/photon target.
I have very little knowledge of the topic but if I'm not mistaken, caustic lighting on the object casting the caustics isn't necessary unless you're rendering volumetric caustics.
I figured out how to set the photons to only the glass object, but how do make it so that caustics are only calculated for the objects they're being cast on to?
Thanks everyone for your help.
