True Photon-Traced Caustics For Blender's Cycles
Amber RutherfordSenior Editor11 September 2026If you click on the links in this post and make a purchase we may receive a commission. Please read our disclaimer.Just one checkbox in the render settings, and it works with…
Just one checkbox in the render settings, and it works with any existing scene.
Henrik Soeltzer's Caustica is a full Blender 5.2 LTS build, not an add-on. You get the complete Blender experience, with all your add-ons, shortcuts, and workflows functioning just like they do in the official build. Your renders also stay identical to regular Blender, except now you can get real reflective and refractive photon caustics without faking them or relying on external software.
For product visualization, like cosmetics, beverages, and anything involving glass or glossy materials, this could be a pretty big deal. Caustica uses progressive photon mapping, which production renderers like Corona also use, but runs it on the GPU instead of the CPU. The result is physically accurate caustics without relying on approximations.
Caustica
Caustica
Caustica
It really is just one checkbox. Once it's enabled, move the light in the viewport on the right and the render on the left updates instantly. You can just drag the light around until the shot looks right. By default, any materials that bend light cast caustics, but you can easily choose which ones do.
Chrome, polished metal, and car paint can also bend light and produce caustics. Caustica requires Windows and an NVIDIA RTX 2000-series GPU or newer. It only works in Cycles, not EEVEE. For now, it uses one GPU at a time, multi-GPU support is in development and will be added in a free update.
Purchase Caustica by clicking here.
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