Newbie in state of utter frustration here. I’m having trouble with glass. I went through the wonderful tutorial by Zycho, and came up with some fairly decent glass http://members.aol.com/scanmead/images/glass1a.jpg , but as you can see, there is no distortion behind the glass. Try as I may, I just can’t seem to get the texture application or mapping right. If this helps the settings are http://members.aol.com/scanmead/images/settingsglss.jpg .
I love the challenge of Blender, I don’t want a program that does the work for me. But I’m stumped on this one. What am I doing wrong? I know it’s something incredible simple… tearing my hair out.
It is not clear from you material settings picture what texture is activated at the moment, (blend or refraction texture?)
But in the tutorial Zycho first created an image of the background without the glass and then used that with ‘Win’ mapping. The colormapping/intensity settings you used ‘ref’ and ‘hard’ probably won’t make the texture very noticable. Try the usual environmentmap settings like Cmir, or you could also make it shadeless.
essentially it will change the object’s normals such that an envmap will line up (but with refraction) with the image.
Note: This method will not permit lighting on the refracting object, nor does it (easily) allow multiple refraction. (the method for multiple refraction is similar to that for envmaps)
To do the lighting you will need a duplicate object, with the settings set so that specularity will increase the opacity (sptr), and a zoffset.
oh, and technically your newly-created object will be opaque, but your viewer, (and hopefully your eyes as will) will not be able to tell in the render.
edit
and you will probably need to think about how the refract plugin kindof assumes that your object is sphere shaped, and solid.
(normal mapped sphere blend with a colorband that modifies normals?)
