Alright Andrew Price, challenge accepted! 😎 (wait for it) All Cycles, no external renderers, just Blender & fancy shaders 😉

I've also put this scene file in the products downloads too, so feel free to try this exact scene out for yourself! :D

What are your favourite #AAAClock colours ? 🕐🕑🕒🕓🕔 Drop screenshots of your clocks in down in the comments ⏬ Head to ➡️ for more details! #indiedev #indiegame #IndieGameDev #nintendo #OLED #switchOLED

Hahaha. That transition is👌. The result is a surprisingly close match too! So what's the shader doing behind the hood? And is it flexible for other types of caustics like metal reflections?

Hahah, thank you! Yeah I was originally trying to match your footage as close as I could, but I figured it being more stylized and animated would be more visually interesting than just seeing roughly the same thing again, and something that could be achieved with gobos. Wanted it to actually be worthy of watching :P The shader is literally just fancy shadows at its core; it takes the geometry data of any mesh, and pulls specific angles to mask out the shadow path, and uses that path to drive transparent shaders to cast the colored shadows from that. It also has some customization functions that allow you to bring the direction into more realistic looking refractive caustics as well. Unfortunately, though, because these are literally just shadows, you're limited to shadow based "caustics", as reflective caustics would still rely on bidirectional scattering information (like you said in your full story), which we don't have access to at a shader level. I've seen some attempts at it, but nothing convincing yet. So this shader just plays into its strengths, and focuses on the refractive glass/underwater look. (and pairs with our included spectral dispersion and physically accurate thin-film (different than Blenders new take on it) to help dial in the physical accuracy and realism/stylization of the caustics.)

@andrewpprice Way more granularity, and intricate pattern in left image, it look like some sort of wave patrrn

@andrewpprice Yeah it's not a perfect 1:1 by any means, (mine's also animated), it was just a quick thing I did last night to show off the extra stylization possibilities of it. Taking more time and care in it, you can definitely get closer results like that. :)

@andrewpprice Lorn hits hard.

Always

@andrewpprice Hardly looks like the real thing. Good try, but it’s way off. Fails to even capture even the rainbow effect

@andrewpprice amazing work!

@andrewpprice Pretty, but not even close lol