Edge Lit Glass help?

[CliveG]

Hi all,

 

I've looked through old posts and can't seem to find any answers on this yet.

 

I'm trying to show a glass sign - edge lit with LED strip that picks out etching on the glass.

 

I've basically modelled this and used standard Vray plane lights along the edge of the glass set to very high intensity but am not really getting the effect that I'd like or expect. It seems to be lighting everything else up around it but not having much effect on the glass itself.

 

Do you think I need to enable Caustics for this effect to work correctly

 

or

 

up the glass fog colour and multiplier

 

or... any other hints?

 

Cheers

[scubasteve02]

I just dealt with this on a project. It seemed to work when I checked affect reflections and made the light invisible. I then put a vray light material on the face that was lit.

 

I guess it depends if your light is close to anything otherwise it might just be better to add a type of glow in photoshop.

[danb4026]

do you have an example of what you are trying achieve? What about using a blend material using glass and a vraylight material on the edges?

[CliveG]

do you have an example of what you are trying achieve?

 

How about...

 

[ATTACH]45483[/ATTACH]

 

I'd feel more confident of being able to achieve this if I could actually model the company logo and literally etch it into the glass in the model. However at the moment I'm stuck with using bitmaps and have created a vraymtlwrapper with the glass as a base material and the maps and colours in the slots. Which I find is generally a good solution for showing features on glass, but obviously this doesn't catch the edge lighting like shown above.

 

Cheers

Edited October 28, 2011 by CliveG

[Tommy L]

Dont try and simulate the real physics for this. Faking will be more effective.

VRaylight material on anything that glows, render as a mask/channel and do glow in post. Blend material (as already suggested) with your text in the blend channel; your materials would be VrayLightMat in one and Glass in t'other. Use invisible vray plane lights to cast light on wall behind if shape is critical, otherwise you could use a projection map you could paint (I sometimes use this for complex sconces if the light throw is very specific) to shoot a light directly at the wall (with shadows disabled).