Not so good as Thomas …
but here is my little test :
Phil
EasyGlass test
ThomasHelzle
#23
Great! 
One suggestion though: Do you have shadows active? The glass could use a bit more contact to the surface…
Keep it coming :bounce:
Wireframes
#24
Thanks rush and Thomas 
Shadows is on, and glasses are in contact with floor. But you’re right --> I must improve it a little bit with better lights.
It was just a speed testing with your TLHPro Easyglass (taking about 1H30 to do it) 
Question : Have you some tips about caustics ?
Phil
rush123
#27
That cool Thomas.
“BTW. I don’t think I fully understand the hard black rings in the shadows”
light ->shadow ->soft shadow quality. Will improve shadows. On the first posted it was set to ‘0’
R
ThomasHelzle
#28
I didn’t want soft shadows in this scene. Setting Soft Shadow Quality was the only way I found to get hard raytrace shadows. First I tried to set the Disk Size to 0, but then Caustics don’t work.
And I still don’t understand why a fully transparent object has such sudden, hard, black shadows somewhere, when everything else is working as expected?
Wireframes: I am new to Caustics too, used them the last time ~2 years ago, but here is what I found so far:
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They react very strongly and (IMO) non-logical to the spotlights Disk Size. The bigger the Disk Size, the brighter they become. The logical part is that a bigger Disk Size makes them more diffuse/spread apart.
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Diffuse seems to have no influence on caustics.
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Surface color has - again very illogical for me - a massive influence on them. Even with Diffuse at zero, a white surface color will give you very bright caustics and a dark or colored surface will give you none or colorized caustics, even if you can’t see any color in the rendered glass object because of missing diffuse.
This is all upside down and I already talked to Taron about it, so it should become more intuitive in later versions. -
Transparency Tint is a good way to get glass with a slight color and it also colorizes the Caustics (I used it in the blueish images above).
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For crisp Caustics don’t use too high Gather Radius and Gather Count, otherwise you may loose some structure. You have to find a balance between every Photon being visible as a dot and a boring but smooth interpolation…
I hope this gets you going.
Cheers,
chikega
#31
Hi Thomas,
It’s been a while for me … I’m just getting a chance to take a look at the state of messiah after a year-and-half break and I noticed your new shaders … very nice! I remember playing with caustics a while back and it seemed to me to be very counter intuitive. I vaguely remember the Environment determining the color of the transparent shadow. :shrug: I remember bringing that point up when beta-testing - but no one ever commented on it … oh well.
I have modo 103 and I’m looking forward to the eminent release of 201 … I have to say the examples being posted by the beta testers are some of the best in the industry. The SSS and glass examples simply are off-the-charts photoreal!!!
I’m looking forward to playing with it. Although I’m not too crazy about the Layer philosophy Luxology has adopted. I had gotten so used to the brilliant simplicity and power of nodes in messiah.
chikega
#33
Glad to be back! I just downloaded messiah 2.4d and I can see many improvements but I’m a bit dissapointed that some problems remain (i.e. not being able to move the camera in local mode from within the viewport itself) I also just tried moving a spot light along Z in “O” mode within the view port and it just rotates. So, I’m relegated to having a split view to move the camera and lights on their local axes in the Perspective viewport. :shrug:
I was just looking at your TLHPro manual and was just thinking that your Thickness shader would be the ticket to getting the density of the glass that modo 201 is showing. Good to see we’re on the same wavelength. I’d have to agree with you on XSI - very convoluted to get results but a nice all-one-app for sure. I believe we’re both in the same camp of being mostly illustrators - so, modo looks very promising. It’ll be interesting when they release their SDK to see what you think of it.
As an aside, I was just checking out a glass shader by Nitisara for LW in the NT thread. Some nice results.
chikega
#36
My weapon of choice … hmmm… uhhhh… don’t really have one favorite as of yet. But I do need to choose a couple and stick with them. I feel sometimes as though I’ve spread myself too thin … knowing a little about every app but the master of none. There are some things I like about app X, but love in app Y and then app Z has a killer this or that. In an ideal world I would just mix and match what I loved about each, blend them together, and then things would be lovely. I use LW/Fprime the most for rendering b/c of familiarity and I have Sasquatch and a zillion other plugins. So, I feel compelled to hang on to it a bit longer. We’ll see what the 9.x cycle brings to the table.
But if I had to choose just one … right now, and money was not an obstacle … it would be XSI Advance. But modo 201 is really coming on strong.
stooch
#38
yeah i still havent put my finger on it but i do agree that the refraction is not quite what i expected. Although for liquid sim its pretty hard to tell. ill give it a shot tomorrow as well.
chikega
#39
I feel your pain, Thomas. I’m looking over the preview render and the glass that seems the most convincing of the lot are the light green glass bottles. It seems that with the red and green ones, where there is overlapping geometry, the colors are being added addtively and becoming brighter - making it appear more stylized than realistic. By the way, how do you get colored shadows?
I’ve been fooling around with my stomach model again - trying to refamiliarize myself with messiah - it’s been a while. Here’s a mottled dark chrome stomach with HDRI.
