Water Caustics Generator

Water Caustics Generator

Get your goggles out!

Caustics are pretty expensive to render in 3D, so the best way is to fake them. With this substance file you can create a seamles gobo texture of looping water caustics to use in your scenes. With a gobo technique you place a texture in front of a light source. You can just use 1 frame if you need it for a still image. I've included the Blender scene file so you can see how I've used it in my scene. I had to prepare a sequence of 2K of the substance results which are included in the zip file. The parameters that you can tweak are exposed so you can play with them. Parameters included are;

• Cycle from 0-1 to create an animated loop, use a linear curve for a constant even loop.
• The RGB channels can be offsetted to fake chromatic abbreviaton (read spectrum/rainbow effect)
• Surface Height Scale so you can adjust the pattern to your liking
• Scale for more control

In the example I've used a loop from 0-29 frames (included in the Sequence.zip)

The setup in substance designer is fairly simple but the effect is pretty awesome.

I am curious what the community can make with this file.

The substance shader is now working with the timeline in the substance player, freely available here https://helpx.adobe.com/substance-3d-player/home.html. This gives you the ability to export sequences for use in your pipeline. I also did an overhaul of the parameters you can use.

• Alpha export switch
• Animation Speed
• Angle and Intensity for the chromatic aberration
• Axis Influence for the chromatic aberration
• Blur Switch
• Blur Amount
• Blur Anisotropy
• Blur Quality

I've made a quick overview here;

https://youtu.be/7US-WdJxkjw

Sorry no sound but I think it is pretty clear.