VRay frosted glass

[Graham Nixon]

Hi all,

I finally pulled myself together and got the VRay renderer (full price, just a week before the 20% off offer, DOH). Anyhoo, my problem is i'm trying to make a frosted glass texture using a VRay material, and i just can't get anything to look right. Can anyone help me on this one?

 

Thanks in advance

 

Graham

[Jeff Mottle]

Here's some frosted glass I used a few months ago on a Vray project. I'm sure it could be better, but it worked for my project.

[kippu]

tell me if that worked....i need to search for my frosted glass

[Graham Nixon]

I'm working on my scene now, will let you know how it goes, cheers for the material Jeff

[Fernando Lino]

take a look at http://www.evermotion.org ...they have 140vray materials available and they pretty good free stuff there!!

[Graham Nixon]

Hi all,

here are 2 pictures to make it a bit more specific. I'm obviously trying to get that diffuse see through effect. Any ideas??

 

cheers

 

Graham

[Harjeet Singh]

a very soft noise bump would add more reality.

[The Dark Mammal]

Here's some frosted glass I used a few months ago on a Vray project. I'm sure it could be better, but it worked for my project.

 

 

Thanks for the material. With a few tweaks I was able to get what I needed.

[Mat@MDI-Digital]

frosted glass is pretty simple....just make a glass mat as normal and use glossy refractions.

[jophus14]

How can you create a glass pane that has thin 2" frosted glass stripes on it using Vray? So it would be clear, frosted, clear, frosted, etc........ Thanks.

[bricklyne]

I think if you use a composite material clear plain glass as the base material and frosted glass with an opacity (transparency) map clearing out the areas you want the plain glass to show ( or if you prefer, an b/w opacity map with a pattern of your choice) and the white areas to show the frosted ares of the glass.

 

There's different ways of approaching it such that the frosted bands either appear as within (inside) the pane of the glass, as occurs in real life, or are embedded on top of the surface of glass like a stamp overlay. It all has to do with how you mix the composite material, I think. You may have to use a UVW map to align your opacity map and ensure that the banding lies how you want it to (I'm assuming you'll want it in a 2D plane as opposed to wrapped around the glass).

 

There might be other ways of doing all this, but this is what's worked for mein the past....

 

I hope this helps......

[jvlive]

hi clarence,

 

just need a bit more detail on the composite material. i tried it but im a bit confused. see below. is my sequence correct? should i use add, subtract, or multiply? if you can see on the right, it renders only the opacity map, but shows neither the clear glass or frosted glass. what did i miss?

 

thanks in advance.

[jvlive]

ey! i did it with blend material! ...still interested in how to use composite material though..... or should that be in another thread?

[bricklyne]

Julius, it's good to see you were able to get a result with the blend material method, I've never actually used that method myself, but like I mentioned, there are different ways of solving the situation which is one of the great things about the Max/Vray material editor systems.

 

I should point out though, that with the Composite material method, your mask, or opacity map should not be a separate material on it's own as part of the Composites in the composite material, but rather should be a mask you apply in the trarnsparency/opacity map slot of the Frosted glass material, in the Frosted glass material's maps slots. Max will then eliminate the black areas of the opacity map on the frosted glass and only show the white areas as being the frosted bands in the Composite. And then overall, the cut out areas will only see through as the clear glass base. I can't remember off-hand though whether you Add or Subtract (that file is at the office and I would have to access it to let you know for certain); but I do remember that you should know for sure from the preview panel whether you're right or not because the wrong method takes long to calculate the preview image and shows the wrong areas as black.

 

Then you can use Max's map channel and UVW mapping systems to control whether you want the banding to wrap around the glass pane, or just to show up as a single embedded 2D plane in the glass pane. I'm not sure if you would be able to do this with the blend material method. Just as I'm not certain as to whether the blend mtl. method is more faster or slower than the composite mtl. method in rendering terms.

[bricklyne]

Julius,

 

Here's an example of a simple test scene I did a while back with the frosted glass embedded into a glass pane using the composite mtl. method (shown below). For the opacity/transparency map I used a regular checkerboard black and white bitmap from 3D MAx's material editor in the first pane and a gradient map in the second pane. You can of course substitute the checkerboard pattern with any black/white bitmap (including Logos, inscriptions, writings; as long as it can be shown as a b/w opacity map) and use it as a pattern for the frosted glass. And using the additional composite slots, you can add more patterns with different coloured frosted glass, for example, and combine them all to one pattern, to match, using UVW mapping, scaling and positioning with the gizmo.

 

At the time I did this though, I didn't use UWV mapping, and it basically just wrapped the pattern on both sides of the glass which increased the rendertime because of the two-sides that were frosted on both sides of the glass. Normally in real life, it woulld occur as a single plane, (which makes even more sense in terms of rendering because it saves a lot of timehaving to render out only a 2D plane) and this is where the UVW mapping with a plane map option would come in handy.

 

I hope this helps.....

[jvlive]

well that cleared things up. thanks Clarence!

[bricklyne]

You're welcome....