Week 9 – Glass Creation Trial

I have been researching into how to create a glass-like material in smax and came across a tutorial in Introducing 3ds Max 9: 3D for Beginners (Derakhshani, Munn, McFarland, 2007, pages 473-4) which seems to be really clear. I am going to test this to make sure I can get it to work, and if it does it will be easy to apply it to the necessary surfaces on the machine when I get the change.

To begin I created a sphere in the viewport before opening the material editor. Here I opened up the ‘ get material’ window and selected the Raytrace material from the list. I then altered the settings as detailed below.

Basic Parameters:

Set transparency colour to white so object is fully transparent.
I removed the tick from the box next to reflect and set the reflect value to 20 to apply slight reflection.
Set index of refraction (called index of refr in rollout) to 1.55 to control how the background is refracted in this material.

Extended Parameters:

Choose the reflections type as additive to make reflection brighter and glass clearer.
Set the gain value to 0.7.

SuperSampling Parameters:

Remove tick from ‘use global settings.’
Tick ‘enable local supersampler’ and select ‘max 2.5 star’ from dropdown list.

Specular Highlight Settings:

Set the specular lever to 98.
Set the glossiness value to 90.

With the settings applied I dragged this material to the sphere before I looked at the outcome in the render window, but unfortunately it was not easily visible against the background. I then added a few other shapes into the viewport behind the glass object. I was very happy with the result as the sphere due to its transparent quality and the way it refracted light to make the surrounding objects change shape. I feel this looks realistic and so will apply this to the glass on the steam engine at the next available point.