dialectric material (i think) problems

# 1 23-09-2009 , 10:54 AM

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Location: Chelmsford, Essex, UK

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Hi everyone. Just recently I thought I thought I'd try and relight some of the gun models I made at the start of the year. I've ended up building a bit of a scene around one (see below), but I'm having some trouble achieving an effect I'm trying to get.

I have a dialectric material on the panels along the back of the image which I am trying to make into windows. I have put a plane behind them with a night sky/space texture on it. But It wont show through. The panels themselves are rectangles. They were quite thick, so I thinned them right down, then I cut off the back faces so the light was just passing through a single plane of faces.

I have changed the index of refraction settings for the dialectric material. I have upped the refractions settings for raytracing. But I cant seem to be able to get the geometry with the dialectric material opaque enough to be able to see the stars behind, or else, however the material is reacting to everything thats going on in the set-up is clouding tthem out??

There are quite a few lights in the scene, which I thought might just be overpowering the material...I have tried to lower this effect if this is the case through the light-linking editor.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can get to see the stars behind?

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# 2 23-09-2009 , 11:06 AM

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this might make the idea clearer?

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# 3 23-09-2009 , 11:50 AM

The Nurb Herd
Join Date: Oct 2007

Location: London

Posts: 2,381

can you post your render settings too please.

edit: particularly the raytrace settings... also i guess you are using FG, yes?

Last edited by honestdom; 23-09-2009 at 11:52 AM.

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# 4 23-09-2009 , 02:53 PM

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Its ok. It worked in the end. Im not sure what I did. I know I reset the settings on the dialectric material. It was possibly to do with the light_linking. The scene has image-based lighting which I unconnected from the windows, I could see alot of it in the reflection so I turned it off thinking it was overpowering the image behind. But when i reset the material and reconnected the IBL it worked. A bit of a 'doh', moment

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