hi @ all. first: i am new to this forum and i would like to say hello to everybody in here i'm a german so please be aware of my english capabilities )

ok so now my problem: i use maya and i would like to use mental-ray for creating a nice piece of glass. so i assign a standard blinn or phong material to the glass, go to it's shading group and assign a custom shader to the material slot ... of course: a dielectric material this gives me the look i want to achieve - but probably not the shadows i expect from a real glass surface after assigning the dielectric material in the shading-group, my transparent shadows are gone although i have activated the raytrace-shadow and generously raised up the trace-values.

i have studied several workarounds for that (for example assigning a custom shadow shader (the transparent one) and connecting the IOR of the dielectric to it's transparency) but everything dont work. my question now is: how can i get beautiful transparent shadows which are based on the IOR of the dielectric material (which normally is the natural behavior) ??? it would be great, if someone has a solution for me !!!

many thanks !!!!
s2k