Hi, I have been playing with this model which I created in the spline editor. When I apply a smoke glass shader to the part and render it, there appears to be a slot in the model around the candle. See circled area. using a solid shader this does not appear. Is there a way to have the top glass ring not to be so transparent or should I have created this part another way?? rendered with transparency and light through transparency active. Nicholas86 candle shader works well. I am not really happy with the flame yet, too bright. Created in Carrara 4 Pro Any helpful tips would be appreciated. Cheers Neil

I think the 'hole' in which the waxine candles are set, should be attached to the lower part of the thickness of the table top (huh? I must read that again). i.e. the outside of the glass cilinder should not go to the top of the top. And maybe you should try of another refraction value is needed. But I think it is a matter of adding an extra cross-section and take the real-world construction in consideration. I might very well be wrong, but it is the most logical explanation (not the most logical way of trying to explain it probably ;-)

Now that is worth a try. I only saw the candle holder for a quick glance in passing and thought that it looked interesting. I did a quick sketch on my palm but missed out details. While I initally thought the top was below the candles, I'll try it the way you have suggested and see. Thanks for the quick reply . Cheers

If I understand the problem you might try making the candle just a little smaller than the hole.

The simplest way of getting rid of this is to duplicate your spline glass object, delete all the cross-sections except the 'top' ones and then edit a duplicate shader for this so that the transparency is less and reflection greater. You'll need to reduce the size a tiny bit as well otherwise you get the result in the lower of my two pics. HTH Mark

A fresnel shader might help a little too- maybe some sort of environment around it (hdri, etc) so there is something to reflect. Markd

Thanks Mark I will try that. Your picture (top) is what I was expecting to see when I first rendered it. Markd, I have not purchased the fresnel shader plugin yet but thanks I'll have to have a play with that one day. Cheers Neil

Shader ops Fake Fresnel would do it too. . . Really the same effect as Mark is talking about- just that the shader is aware of the angle of the surface being rendered. The environment comment stands either way- giving highly reflective materials something to reflect makes them much more realistic. Good Luck! Markd

Thanks Markd, I've printed this thread to PDF so I can refer to it while I play. Cheers Neil