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Caustic Lighting Rig

Lighting + HDRI Caustic Lighting Rig

Download [4.49 MB]

Metix

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Metix submitted a new resource:

Caustic Lighting Rig - Caustic Lighting rig designed to simulate underwater lighting - Subscene for ease of use.

This is a subscene for a lighting rig to simulate caustic lighting, generally for use in underwater environments.
Should be pretty simple to use, but there are some caveats.


Simply add the CausticLighting subscene to your scene and it should start working out of the box. The trouble starts if/when you try to package it into a VAR file. If you only want to use this locally then you shouldn't have any problems and can begin customizing, or use as is, right out of the box.


If you want to...

Read more about this resource...
 
Until someone creates a plugin, specifically for projected light textures, that allows for dynamic UV offsets

Sadly, you can't offset textures on point lights.
The way point lights work are based on a cubemap, and a cubemap cannot properly offset/animate axis and keep a proper seam ( if you think about it, by trying to imagine the 6 faces of a cube moving in one direction, you'll realize that you cannot keep each face properly synced to have the seam correct on every edge ).

The best scenario is to have two point lights with a static cubemap, and rotate both lights slowly over one or multiple axis.

All that being said, I need to test my last caustic cookies on directional lights, I forgot about these since I pretty much never use them :']
 
Sadly, you can't offset textures on point lights.
The way point lights work are based on a cubemap, and a cubemap cannot properly offset/animate axis and keep a proper seam ( if you think about it, by trying to imagine the 6 faces of a cube moving in one direction, you'll realize that you cannot keep each face properly synced to have the seam correct on every edge ).

The best scenario is to have two point lights with a static cubemap, and rotate both lights slowly over one or multiple axis.

All that being said, I need to test my last caustic cookies on directional lights, I forgot about these since I pretty much never use them :']

What about directional and spot lights?

I understand cubemaps theoretically, and see why they’d be used for omnidirectional lights.
 
Sadly, you can't offset textures on point lights.
The way point lights work are based on a cubemap, and a cubemap cannot properly offset/animate axis and keep a proper seam ( if you think about it, by trying to imagine the 6 faces of a cube moving in one direction, you'll realize that you cannot keep each face properly synced to have the seam correct on every edge ).

The best scenario is to have two point lights with a static cubemap, and rotate both lights slowly over one or multiple axis.

All that being said, I need to test my last caustic cookies on directional lights, I forgot about these since I pretty much never use them :']
Also, the only reason I ended up using directional light is because I’m doing almost what you just described. My two lights are being transformed with dynamic mover plugins. 100 units in opposite directions and then back. Was only way to achieve the effect with just atoms. Spotlight with UV offset would have been preferred.
 
Spotlights, that's what I'm doing in VAMStoryVFX : )
It's a "plane" so it can be animated.
Hence why I need to checkout directionals, they might be working too after all.

The problem is only when you are in a multi-axis situation (ie, point lights).

If the directionals are working, I'll update the plugin and poke you.
 
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