Perspex / Plexiglass

[Nils]

Every time I model Perspex or plexiglass (or plain glass for that matter) I never seem to get the right feeling for it. I never get it glossy enough nor the right transparancy.
I want to make it look like Arai's Lancaster, that's a great looking example! But AFAIR Arai, you do not use Max??,
but anyone, what's the correct material setup for perspex / plexi?
-nils-

[krazycolin]

yeah.,.. and with that so nice little bloom and wipe... SOMEONE.. tell us all how...???

[krazycolin]

bump... anyone?

[kevjon]

Skyraider is probably the only one who can help you here.

Here is what he wrote about Raytrace glass on the old MM before the crash. He was trying to get good refractions in his glass on the P51D.

Actually I went pretty much back to basics with my material. It's just a double modelled canopy (i.e. I modelled the thickness) with an IOR of 1.46 (that of perspex/plexiglass) and a transparency of near 100% (it didn't even need a falloff). For some reason it worked now, whereas it didn't before. No clue what I did wrong, perhaps it was a scale thing. Anyway...
If your canopy is only single-sided, then yes a falloff in the IOR would be the way to go. But it seems MAX knows that it has to invert the refrection when going through the material with the normals the other way. Makes sense, I suppose, for example if you'd model a wine glass using a lathe object, etc...
Not sure what you want to see? It's literally just a bugstandard Raytraced material in MAX with the IOR set to 1.46 and transparency to near-100% (RGB value of 240, 240, 240). Specular level at 200, glossiness at 75.

[krazycolin]

ah ha.... well... i was more concerned with bloom and highlight than IOR... but thanks Kevin..

[kevjon]

Ah well, maybe enough information for nils to achieve better result.

Don't know how to render bloom in max and can't get it too work in Photoshop either. Only Skyraider knows..........

[kiwi123]

What's this ? Skyraider the only one with turtle wax in his computer ? :lol:

You make bloom very easily in photoshop, copy your image into a new layer, increase contrast and brightness untill you have very bright spots on a very dark image, use hue/saturation to adjust the saturation and turn the layer to screen. This results in all the highlights of your image being increased severely. Now apply a gaussian blur to that layer and presto.

Alternatively you can use the airbrush on a screen layer with white, or as someone else had shown on the old milmesh, use photographs of real bloom on cars to overlay.

Hope this makes sense.

[scrimski]

In PS double your layer, blur it, set it to screen or add and play around wth the layer opacity. You might want to change the levels in order to increase(decrease the area of the bloom. Requires a bit trial and error.

For that plexi material: try the one in the attachment. Basically it's the same like Rnnie described above, only with an additional Shellac to achieve an oily film on the material. I adapted one of Pete Drapers tutorials for that oil slick.

[kevjon]

Thanks Kiwi, will try it out.

[krazycolin]

and in max?

[krazycolin]

oops... sorry scrimski... just saw it... tx