colortwist

Fake(ish) water caustics

Added 2019-07-01 04:29:35 +0000 UTC

Pretty early on, I'd decided that I wanted to try and recreate the effect you get when light reflects off the surface of water in order to create the illusion that there was an actual pool in this scene (hint: there's not), but to also try and break up the monotony around the ceiling (since that's probably where a lot of my characters are going to land up).

Unfortunately in this particular case, I needed something that could be seamlessly tiled within Arnold as a slide map to cover a fairly large area without looking too awkward (or worse, showing signs of the same texture obviously repeating itself). Those two things meant that I could no longer use the old techniques I had for generating such an effect, so I had to find a new way of generating water caustics while still maintaining the same overall appearance. As an added bonus, if I could come up with something reasonably procedural, that would mean that I could also generate multiple copies of the same effect and cycle those out between renders to give the illusion of moving water behind the scenes.

This was the end result.

Most of the texture work is done inside Substance Designer (as usual), though this time I'm abusing the hell out of the FX-Map node to create a very rough approximation of how water caustics tend to work. It isn't perfect, but since the textures are being blurred out by the area light projection anyways, I think it works reasonably well enough.