Reflection, refractions - my text get multiplied

Hi!

I have this protective glass dome that is going on top of my watch. The problem is that the text underneath it gets multiplied by all the reflections.
I don’t min the edges getting bent due to the refraction but right now there are some strange things going on.
How can I make this look real?

Thanks!

Attachments

issue2.blend (677 KB)

There are a few weird things going on with that glass dome:

  • The normals are flipped (= pointing inward). Tab into Edit Mode, A to select all and Ctrl-N to recalculate the normals.
  • The glass dome will look better with shading set to smooth.
  • When rendering in Cycles, scale is an issue. That dome is 3.4 meters wide and 24 cm high… Quite a watch!
  • Don’t quite get the material setup. Why mix transparent and glass based on geometry normal?
  • Your glass color is not pure white. This will lead to a “foggy”, dark glass.

This is a pure glass shader with all of the above things corrected (glass object is set to be invisible to shadow rays, caustics disabled):


Thanks IkariShinji!

  • The normals are flipped (= pointing inward). Tab into Edit Mode, A to select all and Ctrl-N to recalculate the normals.
    I need to learn how to check this. This issue keeps coming back to haunt me.[I][I]

  • The glass dome will look better with shading set to smooth.
    [/I][/I]Good point[I][I]

  • When rendering in Cycles, scale is an issue. That dome is 3.4 meters wide and 24 cm high… Quite a watch!
    [/I][/I]Oops! I didn’t know that the unit was meters. When I first learned Blender I read somewhere that it was up to the modeler what each unit should represent.[I][I]

  • Don’t quite get the material setup. Why mix transparent and glass based on geometry normal?
    [/I][/I]I was desperate when I couldn’t get the glass material to work and found these settings (kind of) in another forum thread regarding transparency.[I][I]

  • Your glass color is not pure white. This will lead to a “foggy”, dark glass.
    [/I][/I]This is another thing I always forget.

Thanks!I now got the dome to behave as I’d like. :smiley:
I’ll keep playing a bit with the caustics, just to get a hang of it.

For modeling it’s indeed more or less up to you what you want a Blender unit to stand for. But rendering is very much about scale: A 1 x 1 x 1 meter room will e. g. need other light intensities than a 1 x 1 x 1 kilometer room.

Do you use an older version of Blender? I could swear that in newer versions the glass node has a pure white color by default…?

I understand why size could be an issue. :slight_smile:
It’s just a bit tedious when working with small objects like a watch when the new objects you create are much larger than the what fits in the screen.

No, it’s 80% gray when you create a new material and it stays 80% when you change the shader to glass. I just tested it on 2.73a.

/Erik

Ah, so you’re not using the node editor?
If you add a glass shader node with Shift-A > Shader > Glass BSDF it will be pure white from the beginning.

I see.

I always start creating the material in the material panel. Then I edit it in node editor. :slight_smile: