Glass and Renderworks backgrounds

[Bernard Elsmere]

Hello everyone,

Does anyone know why you can't see a renderworks background through a glass shader (simple or accurate) using final quality renderworks? You can see it though a texture which uses plain transparency, but that's nowhere near as nice. Here are 2 images of exactly the same setup, the first using glass (accurate) and the second, plain transparency..

[img:left]http://design.bernardelsmere.com/images/glass_shader.png[/img]

[img:left]http://design.bernardelsmere.com/images/plain_transparency.png[/img]

[HP Sauce]

Does your Glass, Accurate shader have 0% transmission?

If transmission is set correctly, perhaps you need to also add a transparency shader to the mix (next shader down in list). I presumed a transparency setting in Reflectivity would be enough but perhaps not.

[willofmaine]

I went through this some time ago; it was very frustrating. But, I did come up with a Glass texture that is both transparent when it comes to RW backgrounds and that also has some reflectivity, as follows:

Color: Object Attribute (makes it easy to use the one texture for green tinted glass, etc.; I recommend a class for each color of glass, where the class's fill color combined with this Glass texture will color the glass).

Reflectivity: Glass, Simple

Specular: 6 (at the sixth of those little lines in the slider...)

Transmission: 10

Mirror: 3

Roughness: 0.1

Refraction: 4

Transparency: Plain Transparency: 8

Bump: None

I think Plain Transparency may be the key; maybe that combined with some reflectivity. In any case, I've had really good results with the above described texture...

HTH

[Bernard Elsmere]

Thanks for the replies, both of you - very helpful.

No the transmission was the default of about 8/10 and the odd thing, which made me think it was an anomaly, is that the same accurate/ simple glass textures have excellent transparency/reflection qualities when looking through at normal vectorworks objects.

I arrived at something similar, if cruder than yours willofmaine, using a mirror shader for reflectivity and plain transparency of 8, very similar in effect, but still lacking the nice specular and edge effects of the proper glass shaders. I'll report it to Nemetchek as a problem.

Thanks again.

[cberg]

I was looking at this post.  I am also trying to get nice architectural glass; I  noticed that the settings in VW2018 were slightly different that those described above.  Does anybody have a good quick architectural glass texture, that allows for a bit of reflection, but the glass has some color and depth?

 

 

[PVA - Admin]

I have a few here from a video I did related to this, attached below.
 

 

 

Architectural_Glass_Reflectivity.vwx

[cberg]

I saw this and wanted to find it again, but forgot to bookmark.

Thanks Jim!