Glass block

[josephus]

I'm using FormZ with the Maxwell plug-in. Any suggestions on how to get the best render for (interior) glass block? Should I model each block in FormZ with its surface undulations or rely on some type of smooth displacement in Maxwell (I have not worked with Maxwell since RC5...was waiting for the much-awaited v1). I only mention the last due to the MW material editor in v1 which I've not looked at yet...too busy with other work).

[Bongo51]

I don't know if displacement even works yet. I have been so busy getting basic texturing to work reliably I haven't even considered displacement.

 

I'd try getting one block to work in maxwell and if after a couple hours you haven't gotten it to work properly... well, that should setting things for you. The ideal would be to have maxwell map a texture and displace the geometry, but in actual practice that might be a nightmare. Knowing maxwell the way I do, I'd personally take the geometry hit and displace/export in Lightwave and render geometry only in maxwell.

 

If you are on a deadline FOR SURE do the displacement in formZ

 

[AdamT]

Maxwell v1 doesn't support displacement, so that's right out.

[Adehus]

Josephus-

 

This is just a shot in the dark (haven't tried it myself) but... if I was going to do something like that, I think I would model the glass blocks as cubes, use the join tool to join them, mesh them to a fairly high resolution, and then do a subtle displacement on them.

[AJLynn]

I'm working on some now on a scene I'm doing off-and-on (so won't finish for a while) but here's my take:

 

Model a rectangular solid to make the outside of the glass. Take about a 1/2" strip around the edges on the exposed sides of the block and pull it out about 1/8" to give it a lip. Put a second rectangular solid, normals inverted, inside the first (because glass blocks are hollow) with beveled edges. Mesh smooth it if you have that function. Give the flat parts of the front and back of the outer solid a lower intensity noise bump and the inner solid a higher intensity noise bump. Not much bump at all on the lip. The sides, top and bottom should be rough.

[Adehus]

AJ's method sounds smart, but since I just tested my method, I thought I'd share. It's quick and dirty, just to check out how easily it is to achieve the bump effect through editing geometry in FormZ.

 

 

I meshed a block with a 1/4" mesh, did a random disturb of -1/16",+1/16", and then triangulated all faces. There's no void in the block nor the typical lip', both of which are probably necessary.

[AJLynn]

You can get the void easily, just clone the box, shrink and invert - that part is probably much more important than the lip. The bump looks great.

[AdamT]

I think you've got the idea, but glass block is hollow with very thick walls. For some reason your model looks like solid glass--or ice.

[Adehus]

I thought the same thing after I looked at it, Adam. Glad you guys think the bump works, that's what I was most interested in figuring out.

 

AJLynn- why would you clone and invert, versus clone and boolean difference to make the void?

[AJLynn]

I thought the same thing after I looked at it, Adam. Glad you guys think the bump works, that's what I was most interested in figuring out.

AJLynn- why would you clone and invert, versus clone and boolean difference to make the void?

 

I guess both work (actually I'm not sure which is going to render better in Maxwell or FormZ) but I try to stay away from booleans because of the crap geometry you often end up with (again, don't know how that would work out in FormZ) so I thought of the other way first What I was going for is a situation where a ray can pass through the solid part, or enter the block through the front of a face, enter the hole through a back, enter the other side through a front and exit through a back, which would give you all the raytraces you need.

[Adehus]

Ah... gotcha. Actually, booleans are one of the real strong points of FormZ... it's very rare to find two objects that won't play nice with it.

[Adehus]

Since I was away from my computer all day, I let this render (new, improved, w/voids):

 

 

And... found a strange bug... played with levels to make it more obvious, look on the left of the screen where it should be all black:

 

[AdamT]

That's starting to look really good!

 

There many styles, obviously, but most that I see have a larger scale bump. Living in Miami you see a *lot* of glass block.

[Devin Johnston]

Does your striped wall have any transparency to it because it looks like the stripes are letting some light through.

[Ernest Burden III]

Does a bump map in Maxwell tweek normals like in other programs? Because if the bumpiness is on the inside of the blocks, there is not a good reason to model the waviness.

 

Displacement still counts as modeling it, since it results in polys at rendertime. But MWR can't do it.

 

Bumpmap + raytrcing would get great results, though probably not get a wavy caustic. Humm... I don't know how Maxwell would handle that.

[Adehus]

Maxer- It's just a flat lambertian material... doesn't make sense to me why it'd do that.

 

Ernest- Only reason to model the bumps is because the bump maps aren't working so well via formZ plugin and I'm not touching studio in it's current (useless) state.