V-Ray supports the rendering of the caustics effects. In order to produce this effect you must have proper caustics generators and caustics receivers in the scene (for more information on how to make an object a caustics generator/receiver read the VRayObjectProperties and Light Attributes documents).
The new Progressive caustics solver uses advanced sampling techniques, and is able to trace as many photons as required without suffering the memory constraints of traditional Photon Mapping techniques.
The other method, New Map (Photon Mapping), is a two-pass technique. The first pass consists of shooting particles (photons) from the light sources in the scene, tracing them as they bounce around the scene, and recording the places where the photons hit the object surfaces. The second pass is the final rendering, when the caustics are calculated by using density estimation techniques using density estimation techniques on the photon hits stored during the first pass.
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When the render engine is set to V-Ray GPU, the Caustics rollout is not available.
