colored glass?

# 1 04-04-2005 , 02:17 AM

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Hi guys,

It has been a while. I have been busy at college and have not had a chance to work with maya much. I needed a break and decided to throw a chessboard together.

I used the shader library interpolated glass texture. I want one side to be clear and the other to be a darker colored glass (maybe indigo blue). But I am pulling my hair out trying to figure out what the heck to do to make the glass appear colored. I tried every parameter of the original glass shader and the best I can do is get a faint tinge of blue in the glass?

Can someone that knows about shaders tell me what settings I need to get a deep colored glass?

I am using interpolatedglass.ma from the shader library and have attached a 640x480 render compressed for the web. As you can set both sides of the chessboard appear to be clear glass.

I plan on adding a wooden frame around the board and maybe changing the colors of the squares. I am not happy with the render quality. It seems blurred. I did this project based on a 3DSMax demo and I have to say that the shaders in 3DSmax seem a lot more intuitive. In the demo they slap a beautiful looking oak frame around the board and 2 different colored glass shaders in about 5 secs and do a really nice clean sharp looking render.

In Maya I spent 40 minutes dinking with lights, then hours fighting with the shader network parameters and still have nothing to show for all the work. The Maya shader network may be more powerful with all its parameters but it seems you need to be a super genius and hold multiple degrees in physics to understand how to use them!

Sure would appreciate some help on setting things up properly.

Thanks,
Rick M

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# 2 04-04-2005 , 02:20 AM

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Oops the image did not stick here it is....

WTH? I am attaching a file but its not getting posted? Its a png and only 47kb? What am I doing wrong?

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# 3 04-04-2005 , 02:21 AM

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image third try...

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# 4 04-04-2005 , 02:24 AM

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finally (smile)

whew! Finally got the image to post.

Once I get the board inset into a wooden frame and the glass shader worked out I was considering making a basic maya tutorial using camtasia for this project.

-Rich M

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# 5 07-04-2005 , 10:21 AM

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Wow! I did not think this would be that hard of a question?

No one knows the mental ray settings for say deep blue glass?

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# 6 07-04-2005 , 02:47 PM

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Originally posted by ctbram
Wow! No one knows the mental ray settings for say deep blue glass?

Originally Posted by

mental ray does not have a "deep blue glass setting"
all u need to is find the refraction index u need to use, and turn on ray tracing, and set your transparency to a blueish color. and use global illumination.

Image dump

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# 7 07-04-2005 , 05:16 PM

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By "settings" I meant what would the index of refraction and other settings be? It should be clear from the very first post I understand mental ray does not have a preset for colored glass.

It should have also been clear that undesrstanding the index of refraction for and a half a dozen other physics settings for colored glass are a bit beyond me and I was hoping someone in the group may have already gone through the work and could pass the values or some starting values on to me.

I'll search the web and figure it out myself.

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# 8 07-04-2005 , 05:27 PM

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Not sure why the tone seems to have gotten hostile, but anyway...

First the demo in Max. It sounds as though they already had shaders defined and thus inoculated the viewers from what it took to create the shaders. A presenter's job is to make it look easy user added image

Since you don't already have a shader, maybe you can find one. Try here: https://www.highend3d.com/maya/shaders/

If you find one that is close to what you're looking for, download it then disect to see what the settings were.

Good luck and if you find your answer, please shared it.

AIM: mhcannonDMC

"If you love your job, you'll never work another day in your life."

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# 9 08-04-2005 , 07:21 AM

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I did not mean to sound hostile. It's just very frustrating as there seems to be so many parameters to adjust that you truely have to be a junior Steven Hawkins to be able to set comething up as common as colored glass. I like modelling in Maya but ligthing and rendering are a real chore. It seems to be far more complicated than in needs to be. It's almost like they are trying to force artists to pay for training seminars and tutorials to be able to use something that could easily be put into a more user friendly and less Einsteinian interface.

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colored glass?

image third try...

finally (smile)

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