S2:W3 Caustics // Render Weekly
April, 2019
3DS Max / Corona Renderer
Produced with the ultimate aim of demonstrating caustics (i.e. light being focused and diffused via refraction). Modelling and fluid simulations done in 3DS Max, with rendering done in KeyShot, and post-processing in Photoshop.

Because of the nature of the engine, Arnold - bundled with 3DS Max - don't support traditional caustics renderings. It requires a workaround by using an object with an emissive shader as your light source, forcing the engine to render the light paths from the object, rather than from the camera, as it does with photometric lights. 

The ceramic texture was created by photographing a handmade jug, and manually stitching the photos together to create a continuous texture. The full resolution (10K*4K) texture, specular, and displacement maps are available to download here.