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View Full Version : Refracted Participating Media in Mental Ray

Keithtron
04-06-2008, 07:13 AM
Hey everyone,

I'm finishing off my thesis right now, and I need to render a baby in a fluid filled glass sphere. I just set up a render layer (in Maya 2008) for the participating media simulating the fluid, and it's working pretty nicely.

Here are the test renders:

http://keithdigital.com/thesis/PMpass1.jpg

http://keithdigital.com/thesis/PMpass2.jpg


The problem is that I can't get the refraction of the sphere-ish container in my participating media pass. I need to do that in order for it all to match up in compositing. I tried making a duplicate of the sphere, killing the reflections, and just refracting with it, but that didn't work and just gave me some wacky results.

Any suggestions as to what I could be doing wrong or how I should approach this? Thanks in advance for any help or input!
Keithtron
04-11-2008, 08:36 AM
Got it working. Re-tried my original approach of having a copy of the container geo,which just refracts and doesn't provide any other shading or anything. Works like a charm now.

Just a side note... if you try it and are getting weird triangles appearing all over your container geometry, it's probably depth-fighting between the 2 copies. It was a frustrating issue at first and took some fiddling to figure out that was the problem, but just scale down the PM volume geo a tiny bit and you'll be fine.
:-)
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04-11-2008, 08:36 AM
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