Playing With Some Window Glass Rendering

[VisualDandD]

I prefer to do watercolor with line renders as they take much less effort than raytracing to get a nice look.  They leave enough to the imagination that they dont need to be perfect.

 

With raytracing, I have gone to extremes to get that nice look from my glass like putting up giant 'billboards' to get good image reflections...etc.   It is usually the glass that lacks character in most of the views...but especially the non ray traced ones.

 

Tonight I decided to play a little and did a simple technique of applying a custom texture to my windows to get the effect very easily.   Not sure if others do the same, but wanted to throw this out there.   It helps a lot to take the sterile look out of a model.  See what you guys think.   This took me about 30 minutes of playing and now that I have it saved, I should just be able to re-use it with small adjustments. 

 

[HumbleChief]

I think that's very cool. It looks like each window has a different texture - is that so? Or did you change the orientation? Or??

[Gawdzira]

Da, Da, Da, Da, Dude..... That is a great trick.

[Dennis_Gavin]

panoramic backdrop with mirror for glass or glass set to high reflection?

[AlwaysEastern]

Justin, Very nice. Ditto on Dennis's question?

[VisualDandD]

panoramic backdrop with mirror for glass or glass set to high reflection?

No.  Soooooooooooo much simpler then that.  I have played with that before to get the look I wanted and it was a major PITA and took tons of time.  This is just a standard backdrop too.

 

The window is "painted" with the material painter.  (first I select the surface and make a copy of the material for the glass and re-name "glass sky view" it so I can switch back and fourth easy).  Material properties are still left as "reflective" under properties.  I can then eyedropper and paint the rest of the windows (even mulled units) which you cant access the material DBX when mulled.

 

I then play with the scale and offset to get the right look.   The texture has to be big enough so it can span across multiple mulled units without repeating.   I settled on x=120 and y=130.   Last I mess with the offest.  To get more "sky" in the view, I brought the texture point down a little to y= -10.

 

I am sure from plan to plan you would have to make small adjustments to scale and offset to get that right balance, but it can be done very quickly.

 

This looks great in watercolor.   In standard render it is not as dramatic.   I found that adjusting the diffuse down to 80, dropping emissive down to 0 and setting transparency to about 60 gave some good effects. (I did not run a ray trace, but I am sure I could come up with a good look)

 

I attached the picture that I "painted" on the windows.   Took me a while to find the one with the right balance.   

 

Let me know if any of you guys play with the idea and what you think, or any improvements you can possibly come up with.

 

Justin

[Dennis_Gavin]

Justin - Nice look and simple.  When you start getting into artistic looks the sky's the limit!   ;o)

[VisualDandD]

The effect works well in ray trace.   This is a quick dirty one,....I used a different camera so I did not fix my background.   Really just wanted to see the window effect.   Tweaked the transparency and emissive and this worked great for a quick one.

 

Again....no bumpmaps...etc.   Just quick and dirty.   The "image" type landscaping would need changed to help this out a lot.  This was 3min with 10 passes.  (small though...1000x480)

Cant believe I did not think of this earlier....this is so much easier to get good looking glass..