Disabling Caustics in Materials

[rendermagic]

I've noticed while rendering many different types of scenes with a variety of materials that materials which produce caustic characteristics take much longer to cleanup. I assume it's because they tend to represent a small portion of the overall film and the probability of traced rays hitting that area is much lower.

So, what if I wanted to disable / discard rays that trace those caustics? The idea is that if I can adjust a glass material to such a way that it wouldn't produce the caustic characteristics, I wouldn't have to wait so long for the overall scene to clean up. Although it would be technically 'biased', I probably wouldn't care that a material and/or scene didn't produce any caustics that we would see in the real world. If I don't let me scene cook long enough, I end up with a few areas of 'undeveloped' caustics, even though the rest of the scene is perfectly clean, including transparent volumes.

So, are there ways to adjust any materials' properties to either suppress or completely prevent those rays from fully tracing out?

[B.Y.O.B.]

You could use the linear tonemapper (NOT autolinar) and render the caustic area with border-rendering (in case you use blender, and maybe even without that via tweaking the lxs-file): http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/Border_Render

[rendermagic]

You could use the linear tonemapper (NOT autolinar) and render the caustic area with border-rendering (in case you use blender, and maybe even without that via tweaking the lxs-file): http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/Border_Render

Wow...that was a quick reply. Thanks!

I forgot to mention that I was able to succeed in some previous test by using the border rendering feature. It was actually quite useful for this purpose, but soon after I began to wonder if caustics could be suppressed / disabled so that I would have never had to border render in the first place.

Anyone other ideas besides border renders?