Complex Acrylic Material

[onyx]

For the past couple days I've been racking my head trying to create this complex acrylic material that resembles a piece of furniture i have.

 

Basically its a pieces of thick refractive acrylic joined together its has a very nice glassy look to it, also, the back side of the vertical piece has a red colored less transparent strip of of acrylic instead of the clear. This lets the red color project and bounce around the whole piece from different angles, its a very cool effect. So i was able to get the bounce to work correctly but then i realized that the material i created wasn't behaving exactly like my sample. When i look at the sample i can see through the acrylic and see edges on the other side, it makes the depth and thickness and geometry of the object obvious even though its warped where faces overlap.Bellow I've attached a photo of the sample showing the location of the red strip outlined in green, and the effect im trying to achieve outlined in orange.

 

My material isn't doing that and it looks frail and thin like brittle pieces of glass stuck together.

I tried to sue a small outer shell modifier as a cheat to make get the effect i was looking for and it kind of worked but then i lost the red color bouncing around the objects. I could really use some help with this if anyone has mastered these kind of complex materials, I've always had trouble getting water to look realistic no matter how mater tutorials i watch its probably the same reason this is giving me trouble. I'm using Max2016 and vray 3.30.05 and my materials settings are posted below, thanks in advance for all of your help!!

[ahmeds]

Hello Garland. I've tried to replicate that acrylic material and you're right, it's hard. The only way I achieved the look is by using a multi sub object mat with different material IDs. On the large surfaces, I used an refraction IOR of 1.1, but the strip surfaces have another material (duplicate of the original material) with the only difference being the IOR which is set to high arbitrary number, in this case 6.

 

I can't get the bottom sheet to reflect the red strip though, no matter which angle I look at it.

 

 

I hope this helps.

Edited January 5, 2018 by ahmeds

[onyx]

^ The result on that looks pretty close! Using multiple materials is a great idea, thanks im gonna try that out.