For those who don’t know the tool: Real Caustics is a Blender add-on that bakes caustic textures for scenes, then you can carry them into a USD pipeline without dragging your render engine into a fistfight.

The pitch, minus the pool noodles

Caustics are the moving light patterns you see under shallow water, like on a pool floor or riverbed. Real Caustics is an add-on for Blender that targets that exact look, with a workflow built around animated water surfaces. It is designed for fluid simulations, ocean modifiers, dynamic paint, and any mesh-based water surface, with the pattern tracking the surface shape frame by frame.

The product page states a clear intention: stop faking caustics with video textures or noisy approximations, and generate patterns that follow the water motion instead. That is a creative goal, not a standards document, but it sets expectations for what the tool tries to automate.

One noteworthy disclosure sits right on the page: development used AI coding tools, while the author directed and validated the technical decisions, node structures, interaction logic, and tests.

Bake once, keep your renders on a diet

Real Caustics generates caustics as textures that get baked. The claim is that once generated, they add zero overhead to your render, since the heavy lifting happened during baking. The workflow is hands-on and iterative: Generate Current Frame writes a texture, reloads it, and shows it in the viewport in seconds. After you like the look, you generate the full sequence and render.

That bake-first approach matters for production planning. It shifts time from per-frame render cost to a preprocessing step you can schedule and version like any other cache. The baked output also means the textures can be used in any render engine, since they are just textures at that point.

In practical terms, this is the difference between fighting caustics every frame and treating them like any other animated texture sequence. If your waetr surface changes, you regenerate. If lighting changes, you may need to rebake depending on how you set things up.

Controls that aim at art direction

The add-on includes settings intended for look development. The product page describes intensity control independent of the light and water mesh. It also describes generating caustics straight from displacement and bump rather than relying on geometry density with smoothing patterns, adding dispersion, and a tiling mode for generating seamless textures, with the condition that the input geometry tiles reasonably.

When enabled, generation reads shader-based displacement and bump maps so the caustics follow the generated normals of the water, not just the base mesh. You can get the best results when a simulation generates real geometry while shader bump adds smaller detail waves.

Real Caustics is designed and optimised for water surfaces, but it maybe can produce interesting results with other glass objects, but it only accounts for a single ray pass. It explicitly states there are no internal bounces, depth variation, or IOR changes as rays are traced through geometry, and that standard path-traced methods give more accurate results for realistic glassware and gemstone caustics.

Engines, versions, and the part where you avoid surprises

Real Caustics generates caustic textures using both Cycles and Eevee. Since the output is baked textures, it can be used in any render engine. It also calls out USD workflows: you can generate textures in Blender and bring them into other software.

The listing specifies support for Blender versions 5.0 through the most recent 5.1 release, and the FAQ warns that after an update, you should check supported versions if something breaks.

There is also a specific setup constraint worth flagging for shot assembly: nested collections inside the Water Collection are not supported, only direct object members are supported, and collection instances will not work either. If you have a scene-building habit of nesting everything, this is the kind of detail that can quietly derail a bake until someone notices.

Caustics Energy Fix limits caustic intensity when light passes through multiple overlapping surfaces to prevent overbright artefacts, and it must be plugged in after the caustics texture.

Caustics Water is a pre-built Mix Shader combining Transparent BSDF, a surface shader input, and an Is Shadow Ray condition, handling the complete shadow ray setup in a single node.

Documentation also describes a Rebuild Node Groups function that reinstalls shader node groups into the current scene and overwrites node groups with specific names, advising you to rename node groups or create non-instanced duplicates if you want to keep older scenes working as-is. That detail is a polite way of saying version management still matters even when the UI looks friendly.

Pricing and licensing, spelled out

The listing includes multiple purchase tiers. The Individual license is priced at $30 and includes the add-on with full functionality plus a pack of pre-baked textures. A Studio option for up to five users is priced at $50. A Studio Pro option for five or more seats is priced at $70. There is also a Pre-Baked Textures product – a pack of 10 pre-baked animated textures that are seamless and looping, priced at $5.

As always with new tools, test in a staging scene before you roll anything into production, especially when re-baking sequences and updating node groups can change reuslts across shots.

https://superhivemarket.com/products/real-caustics

The post Real Caustics for Blender first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

X_Tesla

If you’re currently working on the next dystopian streaming series or just like to let it rip, you’ll love X Tesla by Xavier Martin. This beautiful gizmo generates a lightning bolt between two naturally animated points defined by the artist that would make Thor green with envy. In terms of adjustability, the tool is absolutely on a par with the competing product from a well-known plug-in manufacturer. Amplitude, number of spurs, frequency, glow, spread and much more can be customised, leaving nothing standing in the way of the next thunderstorm.

is.gd/x_tesla

Grad Magic

Next up is a real jack-of-all-trades – Grad Magic from Tony Lions. Grad stands for gradient. But anyone expecting just a colour gradient here is mistaken. When you open Grad Magic, you are immediately reminded of Nuke’s Corner Pin Node: four dots can be moved through the picture to sample colours at their respective positions. Grad Magic thus creates a colour gradient between these four points. The colour gradient then also includes any changes in light over the duration of the footage.

Of course you can also animate the four sampling points, but it gets even better: these can be linked directly to a corner pin node. This allows you to use a point or planar track to quickly generate a patch. For example, an annoying U-crane can quickly disappear when retouching paint. Both the colour sampling itself and the corner pin can be baked in the node or switched live again, which makes the whole thing very flexible. If you have the Nuke Survival Toolkit installed, you already have Grad Magic, otherwise it is also available separately on Nukepedia. As so often, Tony also has an excellent video tutorial(is.gd/tutorial_gradmagic) on his YouTube channel. is.gd/grad_magic

Caustics

A very simple and at the same time very helpful tool is Caustics by Jason Bidwell. With just a few sliders, you can create wonderful water reflections and refractions. Size, distance, speed and aspect ratio can be adjusted as required. From there, it can help to enliven a matte painting, break up masks or control distortion – there are no limits to the imagination here. is.gd/caustics_jb

Colour Noise

If you don’t just want to break up your alpha a little organically, but perhaps also want to imitate an old tube TV or just want to go psychedelic, you’ll find a noise here in which all three colour channels can be set completely freely. Ozgur Taparli’s tool offers separate X and Y scalings for each channel as well as a parameter for distributing the noise. is.gd/colour_noise

Flare Factory 4.0

Lens flares have been a blessing and a curse ever since JJ Abrams’ foray into the Star Trek universe. If they are unwanted in the picture, they make the artist’s life hell. If you want them in, you can spend hours or even days recreating the correct lens flares. The bench mark for this has always been Optical Flares for Nuke from Video Copilot, but if you needed something quicker, Sapphire from Boris FX could also help. The only time you looked really stupid was when there was neither one nor the other, because the lens flare tools that Nuke comes with out of the box make you despair pretty quickly.

Fortunately, Doug Hogan’s Flare Factory offers a remedy. With twelve presets ranging from Blue Panavision to Cylon Warning, the tool offers great starting points, which can then be further refined using five different tabs. Even the lens flare can be adjusted, and rings and chromatic aberrations can also be customised. However, the Flare Factory is purely a generator; external textures cannot be added. It is also not possible to save your own presets within the tool. But if you are looking for a free way to generate a high-quality lens flare in a short space of time and don’t need to recreate a specific lens exactly, you will find a solid tool here. is.gd/flare_factory

Iris – A Procedural Bokeh Generator

Since Nuke 14, Nuke artists have had access to the wonderful and much appreciated PG Bokeh, which also allows the feeding of external images as a kernel for the lens used. Anyone who doesn’t have a well-maintained database of lens kernels will be delighted with Iris. Olivier Blanchet has created a completely procedural kernel generator with which all kinds of kernels can be generated. From circular to star-shaped, with lens dirt and colour shifts, everything is possible here. And, of course, it can also be used to make beautiful glares, flares and glints a little prettier. is.gd/iris_bokeh

T_Steel Wool

Anyone who has studied the pyrotechnic effects of the eighties and nineties will realise that burning steel wool played a decisive role in the destruction of various spaceships and all kinds of other effects. Petar Tsonev’s tool simulates this look wonderfully. An external Roto Shape is used to define the area of the image where it should burn. Thanks to the Roto, the typical burning or glowing edge can then also be displayed. Within the shape, we then see small centres of fire, and the progress of the destruction can of course be adjusted down to the last detail using various sliders. And just like the practical effects from the “good old days”, this can then be used as the basis for all kinds of other effects. is.gd/steelwool

The post Nuke Utilities Volume 8 – Textures first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Christoph Zapletal.