Basic use of Yafray ray tracer in blender for caustics. 

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1. Add a plane and some basic shapes or more complex models that you've made.



2. Go to render buttons and create a setup as in image below. I set the "Processors" value to 2 because I have dual-core machine and rendering goes quicker if Yafray uses both processors (or both cores in that manner).



3. Add a spot lamp as in image below and input settings as shown.




4. Add a photon lamp in the same spot where spot lamp is and input settings as shown in image.




5. Add a sun as in image below.




6. Add some materials to our glass figures. Blue glass material is shown below. You can use same settings for other colours, just change the colour.




7. Add some material to the plane (I used wood texture with normal map).

8. Position the camera and render.



NOTE: Photon lamp isn't an actual light source. It is used only to calculate how is light going to behave if emitted from that spot. So you will always need a photon lamp for ray-tracing AND an actual lamp as a light source.

Discuss this on the forum.