CGTalk - Mental Ray and Caustics problem

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Thoe99

04-13-2004, 09:47 AM

I'm using 3Dmax6 with Mental Ray renderer. I currently have a wine glass/bottle scene set up to generate and receive caustics. However, as soon as I enable caustics, the shadows turn to black.

Also, how would I make the caustic lighting shine red from the red wine? It seems like my raytraced spotlight doesn't want to see through my glass and wine, even though they're set to transparent 10 and 25% respectively, using Mental Ray's Dielectric shader (Index of Refraction are set accordingly). What are those bumpy "carbonation" fragments inside the wine glass? The scene below is a very simplified scene of what I'm working on to give you an example. I also included the settings.

http://www.longviewvision.com/other/001.jpg

http://www.longviewvision.com/other/002.jpg

Thoe99

04-13-2004, 09:48 AM

http://www.longviewvision.com/other/003.jpg

http://www.longviewvision.com/other/004.jpg

http://www.longviewvision.com/other/005.jpg

Emmortal1

04-14-2004, 09:24 PM

I'm not a Max user, but I do know in Maya that there is an option to enable Transparent shadows when using Caustics. This was added in the Maya 5.0.1 update with mental ray 3.2.6. Before that, you had to add a Shadow Transparency shader to the shading network of the glass in order to achieve that effect.

Hope that helps point you in the right direction.

Thoe99

04-20-2004, 08:42 AM

Here's what I have of my render, and I call it finished. I couldn't figure out my problems, despite hours upon hours of messing with it. I ended up just manually simulating the caustics. Yes, it does look odd, but only me and you know that ;).

http://www.longviewvision.com/other/006.jpg

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