V-Ray Caustics preventing direct light from passing through windows?

[handelo]

Hey everyone!

I've entered into the realm of V-Ray and have been trying to make my first realistic render.

Unfortunately, I've run into a little snag.

 

I'm using a Simple VRaySun and Sky lighting with an HDRI mapped to the environment. Primary bounces are set to Irradiance Map and secondary are set to Light Cache, and rendered through a VRay Physical Camera.

 

Everything seems fine, until I turn on Caustics. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves:

 

Caustics off:

 

Caustics on:

 

(Note: These are rendered at low quality for preview purposes, but cranking up the Irradiance map and light cache settings has no effect on this issue. And ugh, no spoiler tags here?).

 

As you can see, the light from the VRaySun no longer penetrates the window panes. The material applied to them is a regular glass one (completely transparent with an IOR of 1.6), but the glass is 2.5mm thick - hardly enough to distort the light so much that it wouldn't pass through the glass entirely. You can even see how little it actually refracts the light through the open window.

 

I've tried fiddling with the caustics settings, and turning on Reflective GI Caustics, and that managed to brighten up the scene, but the light still doesn't go through the windows. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong...

 

Any help would be appreciated!

 

Edit: Wow, this post took 3 days to approve >.

Edited February 2, 2013 by handelo