Hi guys. I’m new to Blender and I’m having a problem with a reflective surface not rendering as the preview says it should (see attached image).
The preview window shows everything fine but the render window (inset) shows a black spot in the centre of the lamp’s reflection. Does anyone know why this would happen or has experienced this themselves? Have I flipped a switch I shouldn’t have somewhere in the render settings?
At the moment there’s nothing in the scene apart from the spaceship (whose window you see in the inset image) and a lamp, which is about 2 full grid squares away from the ship. All I want to reflect is light.
The strangest thing is when the lamp is reflecting off the metal body of the ship it works fine. It’s only on this “window” object that it’s rendering the black hole in the middle. It’s a RayTransp object if that’s of any help in solving this.
I’ve uploaded another pic here to give a better idea.
The left window shows the texture preview, all looking good. The middle one is the F12 render of the surface from the front. As you can see, it looks fine. The right-hand window shows the same surface from the unlit side. It appears as though the spec highlight is casting some kind of shadow through the glass and out the other side towards the camera. Only I’ve set it so that after 0.09 units the light is fully filtered out when passing through the glass. Is there a separate option for shadow filtering?
@RickyBlender: I have done much tweaking in the mirror and shader panels within the texture buttons window, as well as setting spec to maximum.
I’m wondering if I could solve this by just putting another surface behind the window, but I’ve got a duplicate of the window behind it so it has some depth when you catch the transparency areas.
it’s still hard to figure out what’s going on from your pics
but it looks like you need to add more lights so you can see the other side of the window
if you want the window to be transparent you need to turn on “Ray transp” or “Ztransp”
and make sure the lights are set to the same transparency method (ray or z buffer)
ray tracing is more accurate but takes a lot longer to render
if the glass window has thickness - (which you said it does)
you will also need to make sure the rays travel far enough through the marterial
play with the Ray Depth value
is it the white spot in the middle of yelllow area?
try the spot ligth and reset the shadow may be?
it’s difficult with no file to look at !
don’t forget the the spec high will create lots of reflection in the material if ray trace is set
you also remove the raytrace in the render
but then it cold affect a lot of other things too !
HA! Success! I was just about to upload a .blend file for you but I’ve fixed it
In the MirrorTrans panel under RayMirror is a drop-down menu with 2 options. It was set to Fade to Material Colour (oddly the material is a goldish colour so I dunno why it was making it black). Changing it to Fade to Sky Colour fixed it. I don’t know how but it did Thanks guys, I doubt I would have stumbled on that if I wasn’t following your advice; I was all but ready to give it up as a lost cause.
Thanks for that link waylow, I’ve got those bookmarked and I’ll definitely check them out.
Take it easy guys. No doubt I’ll be back soon.
Edit: Reading the tooltip on that drop-down menu, it makes sense.