IOR problem with glass

Support Materials and Textures
1

I’m trying to design a bell jar, but any time I give the material an IOR above 1 (I’m setting to 1.5 for glass), I get these wrinkled distortions along the path of the mesh. (Click for larger image.)

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/103/368394033_f672b49fb8_o.jpg

I’ve consulted a couple tutorials, especially this one, but they don’t seem to cover my problem.

Can anyone help me fix this? Is the problem with the mesh rather than the material?

2

It seems to be a modelling problem; you have more than two sides (inside and outside) to the bell; there seems to be another set of faces between them?

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3

do you have any textures applied to the mesh?

4

I just made something like that:
http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/9319/futurama2ia.th.jpg

Here’s the .blend if it helps:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/court1/blender/blenderartists/futurama2.blend

5

Thanks so much for sharing your work. It looks great.

I’ve tried examining it to find some sort of clue but no luck so far. For some reason it doesn’t preview properly, on my computer. I even imported your bell jar into my blend to compare but it came out with the same problem in preview.

Thanks to the rest of you for your suggestions but I’m not sure what might be wrong with my mesh. This is what it looks like in cross-section:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/147/373658286_d985badb22_o.jpg

Perhaps this is a problem with preview? Or with my render settings? When I tried to render my blend I got an error about the render buffer’s default path that I haven’t been able to fix yet.

6

I’m with fligh% here. This could be caused by extraneous faces bridging the inner and outer surfaces of the jar. You can usually reveal them in edit mode by doing Select->Non-manifold.

7

Remove the doubles and flip the normal, that may help.

8

No doubles to eliminate. I’ve already recalculated normals without effect.

Select>Non-manifold had no effect. I presume that means the mesh is entirely manifold.

I doubt that it’s a modeling problem simply because Talking_Toaster’s jar experienced the same issues when I imported it, even though it looks fine in his blend (as pictured above). This suggests that it’s a global setting or something doesn’t it?

Thanks for all of the suggestions!

9

Could you please post a .blend?

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