LogInMike Pan explained how out-of-the-box Blender Cycles can be used for creating realistic caustics.
3D Blender Artist and Programmer Mike Pan has recently showcased a brief demo highlighting the capability of Blender Cycles to render shadow caustics without the reliance on external plug-ins or third-party solutions.
According to Mike, achieving realistic caustics in Blender involves activating 'Shadow Caustics' in lamp settings, enabling 'Cast Shadow Caustics' for the water surface in object settings, toggling 'Receive Shadow Caustics' for the cube, and then rendering the result using Cycles. The example demo shared by the author, embedded above, has a sample count of around 2000 and was cleaned up with denoising.
You can check out more of Mike's awesome works by visiting the artist's website, Twitter, and Mastodon pages.
And if you want to learn more about setting up appealing caustics FX in Blender, here are a couple of tutorials and other artists' projects that might help you out:
Tutorial: Making an Easy Caustics Effect in Blender
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