Toolkit 2 - Maya: Caustic Effects

 Caustics is the effect of light traveling though water and reflecting off the seabed, often having a wave appeal.

 To create the caustics image first, we can use a free caustic generator. 

 Once in and rendered, we can change the following settings to get a better look; 

 - Size: 1024. Sampling: 4. Blur: 5. Number of frames: 50

Caustic Generator

  We then export and place the sequence into After Effects. Here we use the Fast Blur, increase the blurriness to 5 and repeat the edge pixels. We then attach a Brightness and Contrast effect, increase as wanted and render out as a .Tiff sequence. The next step will be placing the caustic into Maya.

After Effects

  Once in Maya, we bring in a spotlight and position it in the right place, rotating and increasing the size. We then change the following attributes: 

  -  Exposure: 12. Radius: 3. Sample: 3.

Pre-Caustics

  Once we have taken a test render, we place a Gobo filter over the spotlight. Under the slide map, we bring in the caustic image sequence, and change the setting to enable a animation. Firstly, we need to delete the expression on the image number, and place set keys on the first and last frames. Then to able a constant cycle, we change the Anim Curve Attributes to cycle pre and post infinity. A last step here is to change the InTan and OutTan to linear (this has to be typed in).

   So to be able to see our caustics, we need to bring in another light. Using the area light and changing the settings, we return back to change the colour balance to 2. On the area light, we add a murky blue colour for a more watery effect.

 The caustic is much to small at this point, going to the place2d texture node allows us to increase the repeat UV tiles to 3. This makes a much better look. To complete the environment style, we want to introduce some atmosphere. 

Atmosphere

 Once the Atmosphere is created (via the Maya render settings), we can change the density to 0.02 and increase the volume samples to 12. Bringing up the spotlight intensity will finish the scene, allowing it to be rendered out for animation. 

Final Scene