Hello and thanks for your time,

I know this question has been asked to hell, and I have searched around for some tutorials and tips regarding this but I haven’t really found what I’m looking for.

I want to set up classic underwater scene (lake) showing some caustics, the bottom of the lake, and the surface of the lake (but from underwater), with some creatures in it, all using MR Sun Sky and Physical Sky.

The reason is to approach it in a real world scenario, high realism, and treating it in an honest way instead of the classic “faking” approach (noise maps for caustics etc).

Just looking for some solid ideas, tips or tutorials to point me in the right direction.

Thanks, K

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Jeff Patton has done some stuff on that subject. Doing it in a non-fake physical way is tricky and Parti Volume can be very slow to render, so faking it should be a consideration.
projected-caustics
volume-caustic

One tip (ok two): put a wavy film (animated) in front of your camera and add particles that “flow” across the space. Unless that is what you meant by “fake?”

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