Rendering Clear Glass

[Night8917]

John, Yes it was done with the Chief v9.5 Povray, after MANY MANY hours of trial and error...

Maybe there are other things playing in to, like light settings for instance.

[jsimanyi]

Thanks to both of you! Dean, it's funny that looking at POV via command line doesn't seem so befuddling after working with Ruby. I think I will give it a shot in the near future (and of course post my results, good or bad).

Thanks,

John S.

[Night8917]

Hi Guys and girls.

Finally done with the Raytrace.

It's not perfect have to play with the camera angle to get the reflection on the glass better.

I have 3 different glass materials that I use, see picture, but using these settigs and just change the color of the material will give you a lot of different glass materials to play with.



Here you have the settings of the glass.



I have notised that if you have the # Transparency Filters Light # checked the glass material looks better in Raytrace. Remember all these settings are for Raytrace use, I don't use Render view so don't ask me for settings to use with Renderings.

These settings can probably be tweeked even more, maybe changing the # Reflectivity # or # Transp. # will give a better material, you can also play around with bump maps to get frosted glass or patterns in the material.

And if you run the picture in a photoedit software and sharpen the edges you get a better final picture.


OK...Any questions???


Have a great day.

[jsimanyi]

Thanks, Anders! Much of that went in a direction I wouldn't have expected. I can't wait to get back to a Chief machine and try it. If it still isn't quite good enough, then it's off to the world of Photons via POVRay stand-alone. Of course, if it gets close to your images, I'll be very happy.

John S.

[pktraylor]

Before I saw Lars Glass Pov-Ray I thought I had a good set of settings. So much so that I saved the rendering and the settings and have used it many times.

I will now use the same plan with Lars settings and see what happens.


Lars, I do have a question, Where did you get the tray symbol? And are you using version 9. or 10? The reason is the name of the Glass is just glass where as the names in version 10 are called gray glass, stansard glass, etc.

[jsimanyi]

Both of your samples are far better than where I ended up, so I'll try both tonight. Either one would be more than acceptable for architectural presentation (the real purpose of this endeavor).

Thanks,

John S.

[Night8917]

Hi Paul.

It will be interesting to see these settings in other plans, maybe the light is a part of the result.

Now to your Questions.
Where did you get the tray symbol?
I made it, took about 5 min. (Symbols maker )

And are you using version 9. or 10?
I'm using v9 now, saving to get v10 or v11 if that comes first.


Have a peaseful week.

[Larry Kumpost]

Anders:

I must admit that I probably never would have tried the "Ambient" setting you used. All of my glass settings have that set either all the way, or almost all the way, to the left. Great job! I will add that to my list of glass settings.

Not sure that is what I would use for windows in exterior views but looks great for clear glass objects in interior views.

[Coffcons]

Strange.......I can see everyone else's pictures, except Lar's.

[Night8917]

HI Dan.

Here you have a direct link to the pictures.

Glass example.

http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v6...gAnch=imgAnch1

Settings.

http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v6...gAnch=imgAnch2


Hope this helps.


Take care.

[pktraylor]

Forgot to post my settings.

There are significant differences as you can see. The most significant is the choice of back ground colors. With mine the render was extremely dark but the POV- RAY was not bad.

[Night8917]

Me again.

Here is the same glass on my Cherokee.





Live your life today and not yesterday or tomorrow.

[pktraylor]

I used the new glass settings on a recent plan which has a lot of glass and I think the results are an improved significance.
I did not try to optimize the shows I just used the same camera position as it was set before.

Many thanks Lars,

Paul

[jsimanyi]

Okay, this is where I ended up for this particular attempt:





It's kind of hard to balance the look 'cause the conical shape of the hopper doesn't allow as much play (highlights/reflections) as a shapely glass. I think my experience (thanks to Paul and Anders) indicates a whole bunch of interesting relationships:

You want reflections, but the setting is far more sensitive in a transparent object than an opaque one. In fact, high level of reflectivity make the glass look emissive, glowing somewhat yellow-white.

A gray base color of some sort with the "Transparency filters light" option selected allows you to push the reflectivity up a bit and tones down the overall color. Likewise, the level of ambient light brings up the sense of volume (and gray color) a bit, but if you push it too far the glass starts to appear opaque. Likewise, too dark of a gray makes the glass look smoked (okay...that's just plain logical).

I upped the specular, as it helped visually define the shape of the hopper a bit better. I am confident that time spent with command line POVRay would improve the look, but I'm at least reasonably happy with it. Hopefully this random exercise is of benefit to others, and I really appreciate all the input everyone provided. The hopper still looks a bit muddy, but it's a lot better than when I started.

John S.

[Night8917]

Hi Guys and girls.

Paul: Glad I could help
I know that many people struggle to make some things look real, so I'm happy to help with any setting that I have found.

I'm still testing different settings for waterfalls and I believe that I'm getting close using a glass material with a bump texture instead of using a texture.

John: as I said you could probably tweak my settings even more to get a perfect glass look, the problem is the time it takes to do this. You might have to have different settings for different environments Outdoor, Indoor, Dimmed light, hard light and so on.
When I started, I used 10 glasses, I set a different material on each and then I narrowed down until I finally had one glass left.
I will probably tweak it my self in the future but right now I’m making things for my new homepage and I don’t have the time to play with the settings.


Have a great week.