Digital Art Zone

Does anyone know of any good tutorials or have any tips on making glass in DS? I’ve tried using the DS glass preset but it doesn’t look right. Is glass heavily affected by light in DS (compared to Bryce)? (I’ve already tried the stickied post on shader mixer tutorials and recipies but there doens’t seem to be anything there).

Are you after shader mixer settings or standard DS settings .

As regular DS setting I tend to use. I find as long as you have raytrace setting set to at least 4 in your render settings these look very good.

Diffuse Color 108 119 134
strength 100%

Glossiness 95%
Specular Color 200 200 200
Specular strength 100%

Specular Through opacity = on

Ambient Color 225 225 181
Ambient Stength 25%

Opacity Strength 25%

Bump Setting (to show if using a bump map)

Displacement (to show if using a displacement map)

Reflection Color 255 255 255
Reflection Strength 75%

Refraction Color 255 255 255
Index of Refraction 2.00

Lighting Model = Plastic

Thanks for sharing those setting Neil. I’m after either, DS normal or Shader Mixer type galss. What I want is to make glass that looks as if it has some volume, like you can in Bryce. I’m not quite there yet…

This is what those settings look like rendered in DS4 (no lights) this is in Art collabs new set (Build A Scene) for which I created the DS settings for the lamp looks better than the window at the moment as tit has more items to reflect off.  To add a bit of volume you may need to add a texture map or a bump map to the glass.

here are the same sort of settings with a bump map applied as well ( still rendered with no lights or not a lot to give good reflections)

The Shader Mixer Presets’ Glass Shader was made for DS3 (or earlier?) to handle caustics. Shader Mixer was upgraded in DS4.0 and the upgrade broke the Chrome and Glass shaders.
If you run the Caustics Sample scene you will not get what you see in the thumb nail. The caustics work but the Chrome is not reflective. In the Glass shader the caustics are broken too. DAZ has so far not given any hint on how to fix them and I would not be surprised if it still broken in DS4.5.
There was a thread in the old forum were we tried to get a glass caustic shader to work.

Cheers! Oom

Thanks for this, NeilV1.  Just saved that as a couple shader presets for my own use.

One, I used your settings exactly, the other I did without Refraction, for those times when I need the faster render speed over the accuracy, and I think it came out pretty nice.  (three distant lights, under a sky-dome prop)

Oom Fooyat - 07 July 2012 10:34 AM

The Shader Mixer Presets’ Glass Shader was made for DS3 (or earlier?) to handle caustics. Shader Mixer was upgraded in DS4.0 and the upgrade broke the Chrome and Glass shaders.
If you run the Caustics Sample scene you will not get what you see in the thumb nail. The caustics work but the Chrome is not reflective. In the Glass shader the caustics are broken too. DAZ has so far not given any hint on how to fix them and I would not be surprised if it still broken in DS4.5.
There was a thread in the old forum were we tried to get a glass caustic shader to work.

Cheers! Oom

I cam confirm these have been fixed in DS4.5 RC2. I tested rendered each Shader Preset as I made a bug report back in Feb.

Neil that some nice glass work there.

Szark - 07 July 2012 11:58 AM

Neil that some nice glass work there.

Sure is. Copied and saved as shader, thank you.

Thanks, Neil, looks lovely

Szark - 07 July 2012 11:58 AM

Oom Fooyat - 07 July 2012 10:34 AM

The Shader Mixer Presets’ Glass Shader was made for DS3 (or earlier?) to handle caustics. Shader Mixer was upgraded in DS4.0 and the upgrade broke the Chrome and Glass shaders.
If you run the Caustics Sample scene you will not get what you see in the thumb nail. The caustics work but the Chrome is not reflective. In the Glass shader the caustics are broken too. DAZ has so far not given any hint on how to fix them and I would not be surprised if it still broken in DS4.5.
There was a thread in the old forum were we tried to get a glass caustic shader to work.

Cheers! Oom

I cam confirm these have been fixed in DS4.5 RC2. I tested rendered each Shader Preset as I made a bug report back in Feb.

That is great, caustic glass at last