I find this useful for mostly wooden table tops, but you can apply this to various situations. Basically, in this case I have selected a sphere, duplicated it, slightly enlarged it, and then applied a glass material on it. This will allow you to get a deeper/richer look in your material, as if it had been laquered. And, then adding even more "layers" with mixed specularities and refractions, will give you different effects. Sometimes, this will help your objects look more realistic. This is harder to pull off with more complex meshes, but maybe it will be useful in some cases. Experiment. AgentSmith

Cool, that makes sense. Thanks!

He he where did this come from AS :-) Cool Tut though, I still say it'd be nicer to have this all in one material though...

Oh...I don't know, lol... Yup, would be wicked to have it all in one. (Keep fingers ever-crossed for Bryce 6) AS

It's a great way of doing it. I've been using a 2d layer with glass on top of my wooden floors recently, gives them that newly waxed, polished look. 8) Catlin

OH, great. If you'll take a look at my gallery banner couple of posts down, I used basically the same technique. PGM with a reflective metal surface, duplicated the terrain, increased the size for one-two percents and applied a glass texture to the copy.

Very cool! And thank you so much AS for writing these small and very effective tutorials all the time! I will definately try this technique. Is the rendering time enlarging much when adding more layers? J.

Yes, it does. :-) Something like 3-4 times with glass added - from 3 minutes to 12 for my banner, but then, it was quite close to the camera. And it increases even more if you increase TIR and ... whatever's immediately above TIR. Ray depth? Anyway, that had value of twelve with TIR of 7, and my banner was rendering for 32 minutes plus antialiasing. 1000 x 250. I think that all depends on the closeness to the camera, of course. Another thing, if you search the forum, you'll find a post or two about subsurface scattering that can be faked with this technique.

AS: The ball with '2 spheres', are they exactly the same size or is the 'inner' one you mention slightly smaller.....if that's the case don't you have to increase the 'larger' one's transpanrency?

No, the one with 2 spheres are also different sizes, 20.48, and 21.00 I believe. Although the exact sizes don't matter, as long as the sphere with the galss mat on it is the slightly larger one(s). Yeah, it adds to the render time, since it has to calculate transparency, reflection, refractio, etc. The render up there takes 60 seconds to render vs. just 30 seconds if I just have 4 "plain wood" spheres. So...in a very shakey theory, it could double your render times, but when does adding glass not double render times, lol? AS

Thanks for posting that. I've tried similar effects with two layers but it just never occurred to me to add another.

Looks great, though! A wonderful presentation, AgentSmith, I really like the transition stuff you do to show off cool effects... Erlik, I'm curious why you would set the Ray Depth to 12 and teh TIR to 7? Seems kinda redundant, but on many images TIR does nothing at all, if there's no internal reflections to deal with... But even on complex images the TIR doesn't actually change the render times at all, as far as I've seen? It's merely the Ray Depth that is adding to your render times?

Yep it works on complicated objects too.

What a great idea. Gonna have to go and rerender a load of my pictures now. But here's a quickie. Amazing that it makes a difference even on simple textures like the plastic ones.

Very cool and practical effect AS. I'm sure it will come in handy.

Drawbridge: This would make a great banner.......

Ah, SDL, sorry, although I implied up there, I didn't post the increased-ray-depth version. I tried because I was playing with settings trying to get a certain result. Which, of course, I didn't get. :-/

Damn those "certain results"... Damn them...

Very timely post, thanks AS, I worked on something for 2 hours yesterday trying to figure out what you just posted. I always try the impossibly hard the first time and read the manual last. :) BabaLouie