Texture for Glass Block

[Kevin]

I have a building with a lot of glass block. I made the glass blocks as a 3d symbol and gave it a glass texture. Rendering of this image takes forever.

Is there a texture setting that would speed up the rendering? I want a realistic looking glass block wall, but perhaps I am asking the computer to make computations that are not necessary.

Based upon how slow it is rendering, I would guess that the computer is figuring how the light is passing through and bouncing off of hundreds of glass blocks.

[Dave Donley]

Hello Kevin:

The quickest glass-like texture would be to combine Mirror reflectivity with a modest Mirror setting (like 20%) with a Plain Transparency shader.

Accurate Glass renders refraction effects, which is indeed expensive with many glass surfaces.

[Kevin]

Thanks Dave, I will give it a try. (I knew you would have an answer).

[propstuff]

Dave,

Do you think replacing the individual glass blocks with one single rectangular object for the purposes of rendering would help.

I'm imagining making a bump map of the individual blocks in that wall segment, and adding the glass texture to that would reduce the computations a fair bit compared to each individual block. (?)

Sorry Kevin, I don't have time to try this at the moment.

cheers,

N.

[Dave Donley]

Hello propstuff:

Yes, that would be another way of doing it. A bump map may give you the impression of more detailed geometry. Or, it may be acceptable to use the Mirror + Plain + an image texture of a glass block to add more detail.

You can also try using the Brick Bonds shader with square proportions, in a Stack pattern, and a blue color instead of an image. This wouldn't be too bad if you are far away and don't need to see the actual bumps for the joints between the glass blocks.

The Leather bump shader can make bumps that look like tiles if you set the Irregularity parameter to zero. The Rough parameters can make waves in the tiles too. It might be worthwhile to experiment with this shader.