| Submitted by , posted on 20 March 2003 |

Image Description, by This IOTD shows the texture creation tool "Caustics Generator". Caustics can be described as the light pattern you see at the bottom of a pool on a sunny day. This tool will let you render such caustics patterns. The rendered images can be animated and used for realtime graphics and are tileable in both space and time.
Caustics are caused by the fact that light is reflected or refracted one or several times before actually hitting a surface. The more light that is refracted to the same area on a surface, the brighter the area will be lit.
The patterns rendered by this program are calculated by simulating the effect of light refracting through water. The water surface is made tileable in both space and time in order to make the rendered images tileable.
You can change the rendered pattern by altering several parameters such as water depth, amplitude, wave frequency etc. Some examples of rendered textures are shown in the image above.
The rendered images can for example be used as realtime textures for games and animations.
The program is released as GNU GPL and can be downloaded from:
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~kand/caustics/
/ Kjell Andersson

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