The Rabbit Hole

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kim holder

01:41

ok. today's the day i have my involved problem relating to the specialist subject here. yep.

i may have to explain it later because my day is ending, but i am at my wit's end, and trying to ask about it on the site has elicited not even a comment.

i'll edit the question too, of course. but i'm fraying here...

15 hours later…

kim holder

16:54

Q: No light or transparency through glass and water objects using various transparent materials

I'm trying to render an image that has a wall of windows through which sun should be reflecting into an environment, and a pool with a glass wall facing that wall of windows. At the moment I'm going for having the light be sort of natural. The camera is positioned so it seeing part of the outdoor...

So, i'm trying to take pictures of a pool with a lot of glass in its walls, that's beside a wall of glass. As the question explains, for the life of me i can't get the standard node setup that allows light through transparent materials to work for this.

I've even changed that material to make the glass parts invisible so i can focus just on the water, by connecting Camera Ray instead of Shadow Ray to the math node.

But the water stubbornly remains only reflective and shows nothing of the objects that should be seen through it. I'm about to add more lights to see if that helps, though i think there really is enough light already. Even with the camera pointing straight down through the pool, nothing is visible.

kim holder

17:23

Ok, correction - if the camera is literally straight down it shows the frame of the pool, which partly penetrates the water object, and there is a white dot which i think is a light i put right under the camera, though i can't confirm that because i've moved the camera now.

a 60 degree camera angle shows a pure reflection on most of the surface, a narrow fringe where a combination of reflections and a view through the surface is visible, and then most of it is purely reflection.

That fringe is what i'm going for, if i could get it to also show what is on the other side of the pool. So, what do i adjust for that, Fresnel? Both of the alternate materials i tried have a version of that, though it doesn't address the elephant in the room that the material isn't actually transparent. Something like progress....

Since i'm talking to myself, i'm going to leave it for now and work on other things. We'll see if traffic picks up here and someone has insight. Cheers ;)

PS increasing light path settings for transparency, bounces, and transmission to max 100 apparently just caused Blender to crash. Might be relevant...

kim holder

18:16

oh - a render with that fringe, for completeness.