Glass is dark? - CYCLES

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

HI guys!

I’ve a problem. I am making a christmas scene. And this scene is a little snow globe.
Yesterday I was modelling the glass, and I finally gave it the material: Glass, with the standart settings. (IQR = 1.45)

When I rendered my scene, I got this picture;

It is totally dark! I’ve never had this problem before, so I dont know what to do!
I tried making a 'fake’glass, with; Mix shader --> Transparent & Glossy,
which gave me this render;

Ofcourse this is a lot better than the dark one, but I want that ‘glass’ look, if you know what I mean.
This render isn’t realy realistic… :frowning:

So if you could help me, please! :o

2

Have you checked the normals? make sure they are pointing out :slight_smile:

3

Thanks for your comment. I think that’s the problem, but I can’t fix it…

When I turned the normals, and rendered it again,
I got this render;

If you want, you can download this scene here; dropbox. (First you should make the material Glass!)
I hope someone will find the answer… :frowning:

4

How about the ligth path settings Transparency and Transmission settings?

regards,
tencars

5

Oh man… I am soo stupid! I turned down the max light bounces! Thanks for helping mates!

6

I guess it’s the Transmission setting…
tencars

7

Happens to everyone :wink:

8

Damn! I lost my time… Bad luck for you, I will say all the bad things I wanted to say any way. :wink:

First, your meshes are a mess. The normals are wrong half of the time. Switch all your objects to “Single Sided” at the bottom of the “Object Data” tab (The blue triangle.) and you’ll see. Horrors!

And that snow is super heavy. :eek: That’s insane. A less dense mesh with a bump map would give the same result. I removed a big shunk but it’s still crazy. Objects encased in glass are already bad for Cycles… If you add a super heavy mesh on top of that, no wonder it takes ages to render.

Then, there isn’t enough light in your scene. I tuned that and few more everywhere. (I’ll keep for myself what I wanted to say about the path lights. Any way, I’m the first to recognize I know nothing about it… and you found your mistake by yourself.)

Any way… With 200 samples, I got this:

upload.png1280×720 997 KB

I fixed all the normals and the fairy lights. (Subsurf goes after the array, never before.) I faked the glass. I added a big light. I used a little trick for the bottom part of the snow so that it doesn’t make a mess with glass bubble. (That’s the big chunk I removed.) I tuned a bit the little lights. I found what you did a bit weird. :confused:

See for yourself: (Well… Not yet… I forgot how big your file is. BA won’t accept it.)

To be continued… :smiley:

EDIT: The blend file is here: http://www.pasteall.org/blend/24433

Be prepared for a long night of rendering. :wink:

9

Thank man! But I didn’t used your file. I continued with my own file, and I think my result is good.
It isn’t ready yet, but it’s better!


10

Finally, I am rendering a little animation of it!
This is a preview render;