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I've been experimenting with various glass objects trying to improve my materials.

The trickiest one I've found has been a standard wineglass. I like this one but the refraction is too exaggerated. Any suggestions for improvements?

(Where is Jason Lee when you need him?)

 

This could be a 'LW glass-hints and tips' beginning. All the other renderers have them.

 

Ideally we could share materials/objects and build up a decent library if enough people get on board.

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Yeah these are FPrime. If I want caustics I have to revert to LightWave which multiplies the render times by around 20 (to 35 minutes!).

FPrime is limited in the information it can get from LW but that should change soon (hopefully).

 

Cheers Geoff, I'm hoping to get some activity going on this forum as it's a bit dead to say the least.

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I think your first wine glass looks good. It may benefit from a more contrasty environment. The second one looks a little like plastic to me, it might need a more exaggerated fresnel effect on the reflection or more refraction...hard to say.

 

Fprime can render caustics, but i think you need to be using radiosity and have bounces set to a minimum of 3. Also in caustics options under light properties you need to turn caustics intensity way up, like 20,000 or something. Heres some glass i was playing with the other day, the perfume bottle is rendered in kray, the other two are fprime...no caustics though.

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I tried getting caustics through FPrime following that CGTalk thread but I couldn't get it right.

 

I like your second one. The first one is nice and delicate looking too (just read your post properly!). How does Kray compare with FPrime for things like that?

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Yeah lets do the hints and tips thing, brighten things up a bit around here. Your first glass iain looks alright but there is someting I can't put my finger on. The coffee maker was much better It had that golssy shinny glass feel to it. To me that was glass.

 

Now jason what you done there is glass! But not much difference with fprime and kray.

 

Hey guys maybe some settings on how you set up the glass material and enviro? I'll send in one of mine later.

 

Looking good.

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Tip 1:

 

Are you familiar with the 'air object' idea?

Looks like you need to create one inside your glass. Make a transparent copy with just a tiny amount of refraction and flip it so the polygons face inward.

 

Makes all the difference.

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They look great.

I'm a formz and Max user+vray.

 

I have always had a hankering to try lightwave.

the survey didn't do it any justice , but the survay was carried out here, and this is mostly max and vray lets be honesty.

Have newtek any plans to rewrite their rendering engine, I think it is long over due.....

If was to go free lance i always thought i would use lightwave cost alone would sway the balance.

To think you could get a good machine , and the software for the same price as max.

You get waht you pay for they say....do you I wonder?

phil

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Philip

Release 9 is imminent and it is a bit of a rewrite in a lot of respects but the render engine and surface editor are the main targets for improvement.

 

We're expecting a lot but then we've all been there before haven't we?

 

It's never been as popular for viz work as it is for TV and film stuff but that is slowly changing.

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Limbus can you share your refraction setting for the glass in those? I always have a hard time getting the refraction right so it looks like the liquid is right up against the edge of the glass.

I use a IOR of 1.52 for the glass and 1.0 for the air surface. The liquid has a IOR of 1.33. Make sure that the glass, the air and the liquid all have the same smooth threshold.

 

I also use a gradient set on incidence angle for reflection and transparency. Specularity is set to 0%.

 

Florian

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Have newtek any plans to rewrite their rendering engine, I think it is long over due.....

If was to go free lance i always thought i would use lightwave cost alone would sway the balance.

To think you could get a good machine , and the software for the same price as max.

You get waht you pay for they say....do you I wonder?

phil

 

Rendering in 9 is alot faster especially for heavy polycounts but they did not work much on the GI speed. Background Radiosity is usable for outdoor shots but for indoor images you would need to light it the old school way or get fprime or kray. KRay is a VRay like GI renderer and fprime is an insnaley fast interactive renderer. FPrime -> http://www.worley.com - kray -> http://www.kraytracing.com

 

Florian

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Ahh I always have quite a high spec setting. I must try that.

Thanks for the info.

 

To go back to Philip's questions about LW, I would add that if you buy it just now, you get an amazing plugin suite called LWCad which gives the program CAD modelling functions. It's probably worth the £500 alone for our purposes.

 

I think the free Vue 5 offer is now over which is a shame as it's fun and useful for backdrop generation etc but still you can't argue it's great value for money as it stands.

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Ahh I always have quite a high spec setting. I must try that.

Thanks for the info.

And make sure the glass has someting with high contrast to reflect. Preferably a HDRI Image or some geometry with high luminosity setting.

 

Florian

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Another experiment using no specularity.

Bit bumpier and thicker as it's supposed to be old glass.

 

These are some of the bottles from the CGTalk challenge with my materials and light set up.

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ian, i think that is far too good ..because of the caustic effect and i like the gloss at the coffeepot but just wondering how do you get surrounding illumination at the coffeepot pic..it look really smooth and real... i'm actually didnt practice enough studying the ambience for such thing...( i mean coffeepot or glass ) just experimenting the surrounding rendering.......:)

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