Glass Material

[Ls3D]

Glass shaders can be tough, I usually rely on endless combinations of masked (falloff) raytracers with separate settings for reflection and refraction untill I hit something workable for the scene.

Perhaps if you where to post some rendered results and tell us what you are unhappy with we can pull from our experience to satisfy your requirements, perhaps..

-Shea
www.Ls3D.com

[Chris]

Ok, heres a recipe for glass in finalRender (copied from a post I made on another forum where someone else asked exactly the same question - so some of it may not be relevant):

Finalrender material.

Diffuse colour - black
opacity - 50

now go to finalrender properties & click 'advanced'

reflection level (under finalrender properties) 50
IOR (the top one) anywhere between 1.3 - 1.65 (dependin on how bendy you want it)
leave the filters for both white - with these settings the filter colour respectivly tells fR how reflective/refractive the material is. White - fully reflective/transparent / Black - no reflection/refraction

change from 'split' to 'advanced fresnel' (in advanced settings) now the IOR to the right tells you how much fresnel effect you will get. 1.0 - reflections only visible right on the edge / 4.5 - reflections visible across entire surface (I tend to go for around 1.8 - 2)
relaxed highlight - 50 (makes stuff look like Brazil renderings )

if you want to use traditional faked speculars - put your specular up to something like 150 - 200 & give it a high glossyness (80 - 90)

or you can use physically correct 'speculars' otherwise known as 'blurry reflections' (be prepared to wait a long time tho) heres how:

get rid of any specular highlight (spec - 0)
change the 'glossyness' setting for reflections & refractions in finalrender parameters to 99 or below (the lower, the more blurry the reflections will be - for clean glass 99 is good)

now you have done that blurry reflections is turned on. The two settings above glossyness (min & max) are the sampling controls for this - try 1/1 for test renders & go up from there (I'm using 32/64 - Johannes used 64/128 on that hallway scene)


two more things for when you do your finalrender (to up the quality):
in finalrender globals under camera & something settings turn on 'texture antialiasing' - the min & max above that control the sampling for the antialiasing (try 32/128 for 'reasonable' quality settings)

the min & max above also control the quality for doing bucket renders (DOF)

If you want to use the bucket renderer to fly through some renders, turn on DOF, set apeture at 0.0 & set the min/max settings at 1/1 - it will undersample everything - but will be really speedy

Also in fR globals:

Blurry error% - up to 80 - 90 for test renders - down to 5 - 10 for final renders
Ray threshold - up to 80-90 for test renders - down to 1-10 for final renders

(these are the accuracy settings for the raytracer)

whew! :)

[googoosp]

Is this setting applicable to a magnifying glass material??

[Chris]

yep. Its all raytraced anyway with fR so it should respond pretty much like real glass, you will just need to have a play with your refractive IOR to get it 'magnifiying'... :)

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