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Good glass material for Poser?

Janet

Dances with Bees
Contributing Artist
Does anyone know of any? FF and SF. It's for a piece of furniture with a couple glass shelves.
 

English Bob

Adventurous
Do the shelves have thickness modelled in? And are you concerned about compatibility with early versions of Poser? I generally use a Bagginsbill shader for glass, but it's one of his commercial ones so can't be shared, of course. I'm sure I have something suitable in my stash: there was a thread at RDNA on the subject a while ago. This would be for Firefly, by the way. I rarely use Superfly, and I usually resort to a collection of commercial shaders when I do.
 

English Bob

Adventurous
This is about as simple as it gets, but should do the job for a shelf with top and bottom surfaces (like real glass would have). It will work down to Poser 9 or thereabouts, I think that was when the Fresnel_Blend node was introduced.

Simple glass.png


While I was searching through my notes I found a Superfly material posted by @seachnasaigh - it's called glass cafe table top, which should be ideal for your shelf. I suspect it will be from one of his freebie sets. I can post it if he gives permission, or he may well have something better up his sleeve. :)
 

Kerya

Brilliant
I've got some of Bagginsbill's screenshots for glass - Firefly only, as I am still on PP2014 and am not going to change ...

bagginsbillThickGlass.jpg


Another one:
Got a PM question about the glass casting a shadow problem. For thick glass we have no solution. For thin glass, which has no significant refraction anyway, we can use transparency instead. This is great for windows, eye glasses, etc.

Here's how to wire it up with Fresnel_Blend.

It's VERY important that you plug the Reflect node into Alternate_Diffuse, and not into Reflection_Color. The Poser Surface node does old-school incorrect math with Reflection_Color channel data and transparency. It does not attempt any such bull-sh** with the Alternate_Diffuse data.

The correct math is in Fresnel_Blend. That's what we want it to use.

bagginsbillGlassThin.png


and one more:
bagginsbillGlassmaterial.jpg
 

Kerya

Brilliant
Untick 'Cast shadows' on the parameters tab ? If bits of the prop are not glass this is a problem, as you'd have to split it into two separate props.

Sorry - that was not my message, it was what Bagginsbill wrote additionally to the screenshot.
Forum formatting is fun - I found how to quote a message here, but not how to put quotes around a message copied from another forum.
 

3dcheapskate

Engaged
Ah, fooled by the forum formatting ! :)
This seems to work: Quote any message, delete the contents of that quoted message so you're just left with the opening/closing 'quote' tags, in the opening 'quote' tag delete the equals signand everything after it (the user, thread/post reference, etc), paste your stuff between the opening/closing tags.
...some stuff that's been cut and pasted from another forum....
 

Kerya

Brilliant
Thank you!
Now I wished I could edit that message to put the formatting in - but too much time has gone by.
 

seachnasaigh

Energetic
...While I was searching through my notes I found a Superfly material posted by @seachnasaigh - it's called glass cafe table top, which should be ideal for your shelf. I suspect it will be from one of his freebie sets. I can post it if he gives permission, or he may well have something better up his sleeve. :)

Permission granted! The cafe' table top has thickness, I don't recall offhand how it might behave for a single-poly sort of geometry. I've found that the most critical issue is to give enough transparency bounces to allow for a ray to pass through both sides of the glass, bounce off of whatever is behind, then return via passing through both sides of the glass; that would be five transparency bounces at a minimum.

I've never found any one glass material which is good for all situations; I switch glass materials depending on whether the mesh has thickness, if there is interplay with a light emitting mesh, etc. If the mesh has thickness, I will use one material setup for thin glass (windowpane, bottle walls) and another for thick glass (crystal ball, jewels, water pools).

In general, avoid viewing a lightcasting object through a refractive window (it will reveal the hyper-ambient emissive strength); in such cases, use a simpler transparent material setup for the glass.
 
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