I am putting together a packaging concept and I seem to have run into a little problem. I have a glass tumbler in a package. The package has a mostly transparent plastic window. When the model renders the tumbler seems to lose its refractive qualities when it is behind the plastic window. Is this a limitation of the render engine or am I just missing something? A little help please. memaci

Not totally sure of what your issue is here but just for fun, make sure you have the light through transparancy switched on in the render room. Otherwise, make sure your tumbler is not "inside" the plastic window object frame. I've had really strange results when an object encompasses another for lighting effects. An example would be putting something inside a light bulb. The stuff inside the light bulb doesn't get the filters and plug-ins applied to it correctly in lots of ways which aren't worth delving into here but it is a pain. Just make sure your plastic window is a flat plane and not some kind of box with your tumbler iside of it. Just stabbing in the dark but see if that helps. -Kix

Don't know if this will help but... Double check the Render Tray options of Light Through Transparency and Refracted Transparency are checked. Additionaly, confirm that your Ray Depth settings are allowing the light to penetrate all of the transparent layers in your scene. I've had good results with Carrara on similar packaging projects so I think it's probably a setting thing. Mark

I had a situation in RayDream which sounded similar. I had a waffled plate of glass (refractive) floating with a couple beveled pieces of glass floating in front of the waffled glass. When the beveled plate came in front of the waffled plate, all of the waffle refractions were cancelled, allowing the background to be seen without the waffling effect. This sounds like the same problem you're having. My solution was to render the waffled glass and background, then put this movie in the backdrop and render the beveled pieces over it. You might have to do similar layers. hope this helps.

Thanks to all for the info. I did have all the settings checked off and it seems AzChip's dilema in Ray Dream is similar to my problem. I am eliminating the plastic window in the pack just to get the project off my desk. Thanks again memaci