Can't make these glasses look real

[Per-Anders]

glass in c4d is pretty simple once you learn to not mess around too much with the settings, and how to set up your scene.

1) Disable color and specular
2) Enable transparency
3) Check "Fresnel" and set your Refraction to a suitable level for the type of glass you want to display, typically a range between 1.4 to 1.7

Now you're done with your basic glass material. If you want to extend it further you can reduce the color in the transparency channel slightly, or use the free distance falloff plugin (you can find the link for it on plugincafe) to give it the effect of thicker glass gaining color, another alternative some people use is the SSS shader for this, set with very few samples. And if you really want to maintain specular on the glass then you would also need to enable diffuse and add a "Normal Direction" shader in there to stop the bubble look, and maybe mix with some fresnel too. But none of that stuff is really necesary.

So onto the environment. You need to have something suitable to reflect/refract. Mimicking a photographic setup is in fact often very hard to do, it's much easier to simply fake things using an HDRI and a simple curved roll surface under and behind the objects, then use a few carefully positioned lights to cast shadows, you can also add a few blocks with higher than 100% luminosity around the place to give nice strip reflections. When casting shadows if you want the ultimate in realism you will need to make use of area shadows and at least surface caustics, for the caustics themselves use a sepserate spotlight that's not emitting diffuse or specular, this way you can get a much tighter cone onto the obejcts you want than the diffuse light and so you wont have to use quite so many photons to get a decent result.

From there it's just a matter of tweaking and arrangement. I would recommend using the IRR for this, or if you're not using R10 then Sniper Pro. Though tweak the heavy things such as caustics seperately, and you can afford to reduce the ray depth during tweaking too on the glass. Good luck.

[supergonzo]

glass in c4d is pretty simple once you learn to not mess around too much with the settings, and how to set up your scene.

1) Disable color and specular
2) Enable transparency
3) Check "Fresnel" and set your Refraction to a suitable level for the type of glass you want to display, typically a range between 1.4 to 1.7
...
From there it's just a matter of tweaking and arrangement. I would recommend using the IRR for this, or if you're not using R10 then Sniper Pro. Though tweak the heavy things such as caustics seperately, and you can afford to reduce the ray depth during tweaking too on the glass. Good luck.

Thank you for a such helpful answer!

Saw your reel, man, you're great! You're really skillful and talented!
Wish you make more tutorials, they're really interesting!

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