Glass in 3ds max 5

[twistednet32]

Just wondering how do you make a realistic glass looking texture? I went to the tutorials section, read a couple of them and realized it was for 3dsmax3 or a downloadable material for use with the Brazil rendering system. Step by Step explanation would be great, or a link to a tutorial with it using 3dsmax5. any help would be appreciated.

and the glass material is going to be used for a car if that helps any.

[flery]

iam a nub but i would say a glas material is just a raytrace with little bit of reflaction and transparency...

[twistednet32]

i played around with opacity and reflection, didnt get that glassy feeling. it just seemed more of a ghost white. and im new to 3dm also.

[lockdown2000]

let google be your guide my new commer
www.3dlinks.com
www.3dcafe.com
www.3dbuzz.com
www.3dtotal.com

the first three have glass for sure, the last has just plain great tutorials

if you have BRAZIL, i uploaded all brazil tuts to my site, and a glass one is in there.

cheers

[twistednet32]

thanks but i couldnt find any that matched what i was looking for. the first three had stuff like stained glass or used bitmaps for the glossiness of the glass. and 3d total had pretty much the same tutorials.

i just want a glass that wont reflect at certain angles, and will at others. no bitmaps, just using light refraction. so it stays see through but can also reflect. just basic car glass.

but thanks anyways.

Set up a basic raytrace material & set the opacity as you want. Make sure the index of refraction is set correctly for glass - you should be able to find an IOR table with a simple google search if you don't have one handy. Keep the diffuse swatch black or similar as plain glass has almost no diffuse colour. Add a falloff map into the reflection slot & set it to 'fresnel' which mimics the real world situation where reflectivity increases at more oblique angles. You could also add another falloff map to the opacity slot & reverse the colours, (black & white are usual, but you could use light & dark shades of grey for a better look or experiment with colours for tint effects.) to make the glass more opaque at more obtuse angles, being the reverse of the reflection. (I hope I've got the usage of oblique & opbtuse right there, but you know what I mean anyway I hope.)
For more realism, you could paint a dust & grime bitmap for the glass to replicate dust & fingerprints etc, which would be most useful in the specular & diffuse slots.
To get even more technical, you could make a shellac material containing two raytrace materials in order to have two slots for everything, meaning you could break up the overall specularity of the glass & the fingerprints etc.
Hope some of that helps.

[twistednet32]

hm cool. i actually understood it. thanks for your help. its actually looking like glass, the refraction looks somewhat real. i just cant get it to reflect images or such, just yet. but ill do some more tweaking and see what i can get. Thanks alot for your reply!

[mac5er]

only one thing
"refraction"

refracttion with raytrace
you should figure out the rest yourself