Architectural Glass Reflections

[pauldoherty]

Can anyone help me create a good glass with landscape and sky reflections
without having to create an external environment in the scene to reflect.

In other words can anyone help me fake some nice reflections in glass.

[IC]

In your material editor, give the glass an environment/reflection map.

If you say what software you use you'll get more specific information but they all have something like this.

[pauldoherty]

Im using cinema 4D 8.5. Iv tried using reflection maps in the
environment chanel but with bad results. Very weak reflections
in the glass

[IC]

Put a big polygon in front of the glass with the reflection image mapped to it. Turn off the shadow casting option of the polygon.

Do you have any kind of fresnel shader on the glass? It's a must have for realism.

Also, some people like to do it as a post process in Photoshop.

[pauldoherty]

I'll try that out now and let you know how I get on.... Thanks for all IC

[Frosty]

Seach the cinema forum for topics such as this. It has been covered in the past and I believe Strat, Ernest and myself have all posted .c4d files of our personal glass starting point.

In general:
1)Set the colour to a muted dark green and reduce the brightness to near zero.
2)Set transparency to a muted green at 100%, refraction of 1.45 with fresnel. Add the fresnel shader to the trans channel in multiply mode with a fade from black on the left to white on the right.
3)Set reflection to 100% with the fresnel shader loaded in multiply mode with white on the left black on the right.
4)Add a map to the environ channel in multiply mode. Set the brightness to your liking (can go over 100%).
5)Add displaced turbulance to the bump channel. I use a strength of about 4% and a scale of about 1000%.
6)Specular: W-50, H-100, F- -28, I-6

That is my start point. Every scene and glass material is different so tweak to suit.

[pauldoherty]

I joined this forum 2 days ago and already im addicted, its great.
Thanks for your help.

One last question but. Im relatively new to the visualization world.....

please tell me how to add displaced turbulance to the bump channel.

[Frosty]

Displaced turbulance is an form of the noise shader.

[pauldoherty]

Thanks