I've been playing around with settings and thought it may be quicker to ask. I want to create an opaque window. Like frosted glass, it has to let light through (or not in the case of shadows) but not be transparent. Anyone know the correct settings to (for example) change standard glass into frosted or opaque glass.

If you have Bryce 5, try using low transparency settings, plus blurred transmissions. I'll try this out myself in a test image to see if it would work.

I had a go at lowering the transparency, but I really want to cut out the transparency totally. You know chinese/japanese paper blinds? That kinda thing, they show shadows, but you can't see through them at all.

Try the blurred transmissions. It is controlled by the specular colour in the mat lab. I think it is that the darker it is the greater the degree of blur. If you are looking for crisp shadows then I am not sure if you can do it without resorting to a trick such as appling the shadow as a texture overlay on the visible side. Look forward to seeing if anyone has some other ideas on this!

Incarnadine is right, except the degree of transmission is controlled by the specular halo. The lighter the halo setting the stronger the effect. In this example, there are two 2D squares, the one on the left is the standard glass preset. The one on the right has had the specular halo lowered to medium grey which has weakened the effect. This a premium render at about 40 minutes with rpp set at 64. Blurred transmissions are on. The Bryce sun is the only light and soft shadows are on. I'm thinking about frosted stemware, stained glass windows, etc. now. :^)

Message edited on: 06/23/2004 11:41

THAT is perfect!

The blurred transmissions are a must? They're the key I guess. I'm gonna play now. Forgotten why I wanted frosted glass now. Thanks guys.

You could probably do it in post with a blur in a paint prog. But I like the effect here.

Yeah, do pretty much anything in post. But I like to do as much in Bryce as possible. Just a nicer feeling.

Thanks for the correction as to specular halo. One of those as soon as someone says it, you go Yup! That's it! moments. As to the crisp shadows, short of C4D (which has a shader to do just that) I think you would have to trick it in Bryce. Those premium render settings are costly but oh so cool!

You can also apply a bump texture to the glass material. That also works (at least that's how one does an approximation of a blurred transmission in Bryce 4.)

Like slimsand at, say 600 in scale?

Message edited on: 06/23/2004 16:11

in the freestuff section there is a rainy glass material, it's like the glass of a window in a rainy day, full of drops and droplines, it is really a cool material and I think it will work as you like (maybe changing a bit the texture applied or the settings). try is, if it works you don't have to use premium settinga and increase render times... ok example above 33 sec render with winamp casting dire-straits p.s there is also an ICE texture in the freestuff, but I've never tried it.. maybe it's cool.. (hehe cool... I'm so stupid..)

I've seen that texture. It is really cool. Haven't quite thought of a render to use it in. The more I think about it, the more I think what I want is rice paper. I'm gonna play tomorrow. My PC is currently chugging away on a long render. For the second time! Really annoying. I paused and saved and then didn't notice I moved the viewpoint very slightly, saved again and of course lost the saved render and it wanted to start from scratch. THEN showed my fiancee what it had rendered so far. "It's a bit dark isn't it?" NEVER show anyone a render halfway through. ;-) Rant over. I guess it's bed time.

oh draw don't worry about your fiancee, mine thinks that CG is not art, so try to imagine her comments when I show her some new bryce project

I've done something like what pauljs metions with a very high frequency bump map on a glass material to get that effect. Didn't look too bad (from memory).

Yup, a bump on the glass is going to render faster than using blurred transmissions. You can get similar effects using a bump at 16 rays per pixel, rather than blurred transmissions at an even higher ray per pixel. I use the "sandy" preset under the Sand catagory in the DTE Textures. I'll scale it up to 100% at least, sometimes up to 1000%, and then wrap it "World Cubic". I make the bump level very small, around 0.3 AgentSmith

And, then using various levels of rendering, you can produce different looking glass if you want. AS

Aw darn, reading through this thread I thought this was going to turn into a rant on fiancees and significant others in general. I was going to add that my fiancee has limited me to 2 hours a day on the comp because I ignore everything else. I've learned to get up really early in the morning now or else I just wait until she's just fallen asleep. She's learned to wake up when I'm not in bed though. A tricky one she is. Anyways I'll continue with not saying anything important elsewhere now. I just had to add my 3 cents.

Please feel free to hijack my thread. I've got the information I needed from it. :-) 2 hours!! My fiancee is the best, she spends more time on the computer than I do!! Which is fantastic, but mostly in ebay, which isn't.

itsn't funny how threadt are hijacked? you start with a topic and most of the times it ended with something completely different!

Hi Paul, this any good, done with a flattened cube and the 'fogy' Preset under Clouds (presume it's meant to be foggy!! Screenshot of the DRE follows......

Oops, got the pics the wrong way round!!!

My girlfriend knows when the muse has me, there's not much to be done but feed me coffee! (has to be love)