CompuServe Thread

Designate a light for your glass, Judy, and use Place Hilight to position it for an appropriate specular highlight. You may exclude other objects to simplify your scene, and retain your former lighting. Adjustment of the material's specular attributes should enable you to create a real-looking glass object. -Alan Iglesias

Judy, use something like refmap.gif on your glass as a texture map along with transparency, this will help simulate reflected ambient light. -JE

Judy: I would recommend reading Michele and Glenn's book "Glass and Reflections", part of their Tips & Tricks series, which has excellent ideas for creating any type of glass surfaces inside 3D Studio! (Of course, "Inside 3D Studio" covers this pretty well, also! <g>) Greg Pyros

I usually have my shininess and strength cranked way up, along with transparency. I also slide the reflection strength up, usually a lot more than 9% (no wonder you can't see the glass). Try messing with settings between 30% and 80%, and add one or two lights for specular highlight. The reflection map, however, is the key to effective glass. Also, I would use a .tga (unless you're just rendering flics or gifs) instead of a .cel. John Tissavary (LUNA cie)

You've received several good suggestions already, but to be fair we have to know a few things. Is this an animation? Is there a background of any sort? What can be seen through the case? (not just the vase) Examine the glass, in say a Jeweler's. The glass catches only glances of other light. One's perception of "glass" are these interminate occurences of refelection, shade and very slight distortion as they occur over time. In creating an animation these effects would be very subtle in any given frame and would only read when played (as would a VHS movie of a store's display). If your goal is a still frame, then you need to be VERY careful of not over-doing the effect. Glass is subtle if not invisible (that's why one uses it for a display case <g>) and if you force the effect the glass may seem rippled, smoked or mirrored – very strange material choices for a case. The key then is the gleam of a glancing light and perhaps a subtle refelection in the highlight (Specular Maps work great for this). The effect of glass is also most evident when you can compare it to the side where there is no effect and to the inside edges where one would see through two layers of glass to what's beyond (sorry, but I'm a realist at heart <g>). – Phil p.s. 70% transparency is WAY TOO opaque for a glass case (assuming it is clean and you do want to see inside). Try "pushing" the plane of glass to the side half way and see the effect of this translucent glass and that of no glass at all – there has to be a big difference.