Here is a sample render. You can see the shadows directly beneath the lettering get some color in them, but the shadows which are cast toward the camera are not colored. I have tried everything I can think of, including tweaking the Filter Glossy setting, but nothing is really giving enough color. Can anything be done about this?
Thanks in advance.
Note: One light source is a mesh object, the others are lamps. Multiple Importance Sample is checked for all lamps.
Have you tried using a single Sun lamp and play with the Sun angle? I would say you have too much light in your scene. Remove lights until you see the effect.
Here is an actual photo of caustics I caught one morning. I was quite surprised to see such a brilliant throw of colors from a nearly opaque surface. It was all related to the angle of the light.
Hey, that is a surprising find! Could be some kind of refraction happening at a smaller level and then converging into concentrations of color. Pretty cool.
I will experiment with a single light source. Thanks for the idea.
One thing that got me slightly improved results is making what I’ve deemed a “brute force” material node setup. It’s really hackish, so I don’t like using it, but it’s kind of interesting. Anything that is Shadow, Reflection, or Transmission ray gets used to factor in a brighter material. The brighter material is just a version of the the original glass, run through three add shaders. Then a second mix shader is used to re-mix in the original signal to tame it to the right amount.
Like I said, hackish. But gets slightly more colorful results.
It still isn’t what I was imagining though as only the denser shadows directly beneath the model are noticeably colored. And what I’ve found to work best is cranking up the sample count really high, and using less light in the scene with higher exposure.
I will try out your sun lamp suggestion. Still experimenting.
Try mixing glass with transparent, factor controlled by “is shadow ray” on lightpath node. Set the transparent to the color you want the shadow.
I also have this glass setup that works fairly well:
http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?278285-Yet-Another-Thread-about-Cycles-Materials&p=2615941&viewfull=1#post2615941
What’ll be of interest in that one is the glass color (obviously) and the two transparent colors being mixed on the left.
