David,

We need to put the right shader on the glass and the wine.

Now I have a question first. What is the geometry of this wine glass? Some have a complete glass (inner and outer surface) and then a bullet-shaped plug for the liquid. Others have the plug but no inner glass. Which do you have? It affects how we do this.

Some don't have a plug, but instead just the top surface of the liquid - these are no good for wine.

Is there just one material zone for all the glass, or is the stem and/or base separate?

How about the bottle - you want to fix the bottle, too, I think.

If these are free props, please link me to them and I'll download them and make them perfect for you.

You might find this thread I wrote in interesting. It's not about wine, but the subject liquid in a glass.

http://www.runtimedna.com/forum/showthread.php?t=34646

the link to the milk glass isn't showing,has it been removed from runtimeDNA?

The link works for me...

EDIT; Unfortunately the link there to the glass prop seems to have vanished-I guess that is what you must have been talking about... :sad:

Yes the actual zip file has vanished.

I will search through my archives - hopefully I have it somewhere. I tend to make things and then delete them. I don't have any use for anything because I don't actually do art. Funny isn't it?

I wouldn't say you don't do Art, BB, it's that for you creating the art is secondary to creating and sharing the medium.

The glass creator mentioned in the thread sounds interesting; was that the genesis of the procedural prop idea?

Here they are:

Wine Bottle: http://www.sharecg.com/v/26093/3d-model/WINE-BOTTLE

Smart Wine Glass: http://fast3d.actionbabecentral.com/sglass/wglass.htm

The problem with the glass you are trying to use, is that it just uses a single polygon for the inside and outside of the glass.

For a simple render done 10 years ago, that would be fine, but you can get proper refraction and reflection with a glass modelled properly.

Thats why BB was asking about the actual glass's geometry.

Quote - I wouldn't say you don't do Art, BB, it's that for you creating the art is secondary to creating and sharing the medium.

The glass creator mentioned in the thread sounds interesting; was that the genesis of the procedural prop idea?

Yes - I've been looking for an hour and I just found the py file I used to make the glass. I haven't opened it yet, just found it.

David-

My shaders use Refraction, not transparency. Fluids are not transparent - they are refractive. It's completely different.

Get used to me, David. Ray tracing, ray tracing, ray tracing. I never do anything without ray tracing. If you use anything of mine, plan on enabling ray tracing.

There is a myth running around Poser land that simply enabling ray tracing will slow down your render. That is not true. It will only slow down if you have some shaders or lights that USE ray tracing. If you have nothing in your scene that needs ray tracing, then it will make zero difference time-wise or quality-wise to have ray tracing enabled. If, on the other hand, you have it disabled all the time, then it is permanently off even if needed. As soon as you load anything interesting from me, you will come back and say "wah wah it's not working" and then I have to remind you again to enable ray tracing.

In case I've not been clear, understand this: There is no benefit to disabling ray tracing if you do not need it. There is clearly harm if you disable ray tracing and you do need it.

I have collectively reminded people to enable ray tracing so many times that it has consumed at least 60 hours of my time over the last 3 years. That's a lot of time.

So pardon me if I scream:

ENABLE RAY TRACING, ALWAYS. COSTS NOTHING WHEN YOU DO NOT NEED IT. WILL SAVE YOU FROM CONFUSION WHEN YOU DO NEED IT.

KEEP AT LEAST ONE BOUNCE, ALWAYS

ONLY DISABLE RT IF YOU ARE TRYING TO DO A QUICK LIGHTING TEST AND 
DO NOT NEED TO SEE REFLECTION OR REFRACTION 

WHEN LOOKING THROUGH OBJECTS VIA REFRACTION, YOU NEED A BOUNCE FOR EVERY SURFACE YOU WANT TO LOOK THROUGH. FOR A PROPERLY BUILT WINE GLASS, THIS WOULD BE 6 BOUNCES.

=====

Meanwhile, I'll download those props, but the plug doesn't have a surface (top). This means it will never look right with the camera above or below the surface level.

 I'm really surprised to see that geometry. That was not a case I listed - no surface. That's about as wrong as is possible to be wrong.

I suspect its a low poly prop made by someone who is learning along the way. The shape is right, but it was modelled without consideration of the rendering engine's capabilities.

I've got a question about the ballooning with smoothing on, you mentioned in the RDNA thread, is that how you describe the object's morph changing unexpectedly or when it gets those odd little black lines?

(Note: this image was made during initial product testing; the vendor later fixed the problem).

Ah, now that is a bit weird.  If you didn't tell me otherwise, I would have said that the guy forgot to weld to two halves together in that area.

BB, I have that original zip file for the milk and glass from that  RuntimeDNA thread.  I keep any shader you've done that I've run across in a folder on my external drive. Glass and Water are two of my favorite subjects since raytracing was introduced in P5.

Oh great, Latexluv. Can you post them in this thread? You'll have to add .txt to the end of a zipfile name but you should be able to post it here. I want to share it again. I don't have the shaders. I have newer ones, but I want to compare my new shaders with the old ones.

Want my opinion? Let's use a different glass, DPH.

I turned on smoothing to compensate for how low-poly it is. Look at the ballooning of the stem.

Have you guys ever heard or read thIs proverb (or variant): In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Poser is the kingdom of the blind, and I am the one-eyed man.

I can't believe I posted that glass of milk - it is a piece of ****.

Ummm, well, the glass prop was great and I used the milk shader to make a few other liquid shaders. I did have some trouble with the actual glass shader. I await new and improved. :)

A bit OT, but as an aside: to quote Ms Peril on RDNA:
The shaders are just amazing - really quite spectacularly great! It's also so very generous of you to have contributed SO much to the community - I'm sure you could have made a small fortune by now by selling so many of the things you generously give away - your shaders are simply fantastic...

It only took her 8 posts to realise who the really bright lights are in Poser. What you consider of ordinary (Aussie 'ordinary', that is) quality, Bill, is light-years beyond what's currently considered acceptable and good in this elephant-trunk/tail/ear investigating community. Your original milk shader now falls below your standard because new concepts have given rise to a better model, but it's heck-a better than anything else out there.

Perhaps this is what makes this art-form so stimulating for those who allow it to be so: the best aspects of making Poser art truly unique are freely given to those who wish to learn by one of the brightest minds in the country. For what you have already given us we owe you a massive debt of gratitude, Bill...

BTW, does that new LandMass landscape generator add-on for TerraDome contain any of your work? If so, I'm buying it purely on principle! You richly deserve to start generating a bit of income for your hard work.

Compared to my best attempts at a glass shader turn out either very black or very invisible, bill's junk is a lot better than my experiments in learning.

From looking at your settings (Actually really need to see the manual settings) Here's what I see missing off the top of my head:

Smooth polygons needs to be on
If displacement maps are used on anything, that also needs to be on.
Depth of field can really add realism.. you might want to experiment with that some.

(The example scene you posted would benefit quite well from depth of field!)

I always increase pixel samples on final renders as well.

Most of my renders are done in 5 minutes or less. If you are getting longer times in rendering, it might be time for a hardware of software upgrade. Which poser version are you using now?

Milk box by TrekkieGrrrl.

I was going through my folder of glassware props this weekend, trying various glass shaders on them and a few of these props are drink glasses with ice in them. I am hoping that maybe we could include ice shaders in this discussion as well as whatever new glass shaders BB has up his sleeve.

I tried a bunch of free glassware and I found all were unsuitable for use as a realistic prop in Poser for one reason or another. So I'm making my own from scratch.

So far I'm just working on the glass part, not the liquid plug. I'm refining the glass shader. It's tricky.

Poser doesn't implement refraction correctly. When you look through a glass to see what's behind it, the light ray bends four times: air to glass, glass to air, air to glass, and then glass to air again. The refraction of air to glass should bend in the opposite direction as glass to air. That's why thin glass doesn't really bend the line very much. But Poser does all four refractions as if they were air to glass. So if you put a proper IOR in there, it looks like there is no air in the glass. So I'm messing around with a compromise, using an IOR of 1.01. It looks good for the most part, although the stem and base aren't right, because they are NOT thin glass around air - they are solid glass. But I suppose that's not too important.

The other problem is what to do about shadows. The glass casts a solid shadow and it should not. If I disable shadows altogether, it looks fake. If I enable shadows it looks fake.

Only transparent objects allow light to leak through. I'm trying to figure out how to make the glass be transparent, but not actually show the transparency - I want it to show the refraction instead. I might have to build a double-walled glass, two-piece glass, where the outer part is transparent and casts a shadow, while the inner part is refractive and doesn't cast a shadow.

Very tricky.

Here's a render of what I've got so far.

Looking at the render settings, you should switch to manual.  You have more options for better control.  That HDRI optimizated output shouldn't need to be checked on.  The only time I use that is to create HDRI light probes using BB light probe setup.  For your purpose it is not necessary.

BB, yes, I noticed over the weekend while rendering quite a few available free glassware props that something seemed not quite right with IOR. In some cases your Orb shader Thin glass didn't quite refract enough and the regular glass Orb Shader refracted too much. A simple fresnel connected into the Alternate Diffuse did the same thing, sometimes looking okay for a prop that wouldn't be too close up in a render and sometimes looking totally wrong. And then there were the props that included ice cubes inside the drink.

I use a different IOR above the liquid than below.

I still haven't tackled shadows.

When saving, remove the .txt extension. Save it to your props category.

This does not have a GC shader on it, so to see it correctly you should be rendering in Poser Pro with GC. It will work without GC, but not as well.

I seem to have started a ROLL here, but then this is obviously an aspect of Poser that needs addressing.  If it were a problem of remapping, then my expertise might be called upon, but shaders is something I find to be rather esoteric.  For me, it's something that I'll never understand the why of, and at best will simply perceive what combination of nodes seems to Work, and which ones Don't!
dph

LL,

The shader is not going to work on other props. A generic glass shader would, but this shader is doing the special effect of simulating that the bowl has fluid in it. This means the refraction color and IOR are being modulated using the V coordinates I assigned to the vertices. The nodes in the shader that react to the changes in V coordinate are very carefully tuned for this prop.

I did this so that I didn't have to do a double-walled glass, and/or a liquid plug. There is no plug. The glass changes color in the bottom part of the bowl. Also there is a disk to represent the surface of the fluid. If that disk is not present or doesn't have the right V coordinates assigned, then the shader will misbehave. The whole glass is all one material.

But the glass also needs to sparkle, like real crystal.
dph

Whoops. I did 4 things wrong, that resulted in a lot less apparent sparkle.

1) I forgot that the thin glass (the part without liquid) has a higher reflectance, due to light bouncing multiple times between the inner and outer surface. I have adjusted the Fresnel reflection equation to behave properly in that case.
2) I rendered against the white card, instead of a dark background. This tends to make the glass appear less shiny as the card overwhelms the reflections.

1. I had very soft lighting with only one light source, so there were few specular reflections and they were weak.
   4) I did not have an HDR environment in front of the glass, thus nothing bright to reflect.

I have corrected all these and am doing another render. If it looks right, I'll post the updated glass.

BB,

Ah, yes, when I couldn't find a separate material zone for the wine in the glass I figured you were doing something of the sort with this shader. But, hey, I was in the mood to mess with glass last night.

I need to work on the base geometry. It doesn't work well with IDL. That tiny space is a problem for Poser.

Tried the new prop. It renders nicely! The shapes shown about look very good!

Quote - I made a "few" more shapes. grin

I need to work on the base geometry. It doesn't work well with IDL. That tiny space is a problem for Poser.

Be very interested to see what you come up with. That issue appears to be an ongoing problem for me - if I'm understanding the issue correctly - with mesh sort-of becoming visible like that. I know: ray-trace SMB needs to be way down... I still get it.

Hmm nobody has whined, that the wine in the glass keeps changing between renders posted by BB. In my mind that means only one thing...Over the lips, past the gums, look out stomach here it comes!

Lots of render samples and one has to assume lots of sampling of the samples going on also.

A plugless liquid in a glass that has thickness to the walls. How the heck to you dream this stuff up BB? Amazing!

At this pace, it will be virtual intoxication and virtual hangover.

I can't stop making shapes.

That looks very nice.