Hi guys,

It has been a while. I have been busy at college and have not had a chance to work with maya much. I needed a break and decided to throw a chessboard together.

I used the shader library interpolated glass texture. I want one side to be clear and the other to be a darker colored glass (maybe indigo blue). But I am pulling my hair out trying to figure out what the heck to do to make the glass appear colored. I tried every parameter of the original glass shader and the best I can do is get a faint tinge of blue in the glass?

Can someone that knows about shaders tell me what settings I need to get a deep colored glass?

I am using interpolatedglass.ma from the shader library and have attached a 640x480 render compressed for the web. As you can set both sides of the chessboard appear to be clear glass.

I plan on adding a wooden frame around the board and maybe changing the colors of the squares. I am not happy with the render quality. It seems blurred. I did this project based on a 3DSMax demo and I have to say that the shaders in 3DSmax seem a lot more intuitive. In the demo they slap a beautiful looking oak frame around the board and 2 different colored glass shaders in about 5 secs and do a really nice clean sharp looking render.

In Maya I spent 40 minutes dinking with lights, then hours fighting with the shader network parameters and still have nothing to show for all the work. The Maya shader network may be more powerful with all its parameters but it seems you need to be a super genius and hold multiple degrees in physics to understand how to use them!

Sure would appreciate some help on setting things up properly.

Thanks,
Rick M