How to create Caustics in Autodesk 3Ds Max

Caustics are special light calculations which happens after the light ray hit any reflective or refractive objects like glass or shining metal. Caustics can be generated in 3ds max through Mental ray indirect illumination.

To start with you will be needed an object which is a reflective or refractive in nature. Like for this tutorial I have created a glass object. It will be good if you already went through our tutorial on how to create a glass in 3ds max .

Before start rendering we have to switch on the caustics option from the render setup > indirect illumination tab, but even before that we have to do two more important steps without which we can't even see the result and constantly get some error message from mental ray saying "There is no caustic generating the scene" and " There is no Photon emitter in the scene". These two are the most common warning or error message people get while creating the caustics.

To get rid of the first message you need to right click on the glass object > object property > mental Ray > and have to turn on the generate caustics option. For the "no photon emitter" message you have to right click on the spot light > Object properties > mental Ray tab > then turn on the generate photon option.

Now you can start to look at the basic render output for the caustics , and later on customize the caustic option from the Lights or from the render setup > indirect illumination. Follow the video below to get the details of the properties you need to control for the desired caustics effects.