Texture Baking Glass

[Kaioni Lyric]

Hi everyone,

I use 3ds max and is familiar with baking etc. What I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind with is texturing glass. How can I get like a glass bowl to look like a glass bowl for Secondlife?

[Drongle McMahon]

The problem with glass in SL is that there is no refraction (bending light inside glass). Refraction is needed for good glass effects. Here is a very simple solution, but only for those with advanced lighting: Texture=Blank; Color=White; Transparency=80%; Bumpiness=Blank; Shininess=Blank, Glossiness=255, Environment=255, Spec color=White. This is applied to a mesh glass and a prim bowl in the picture, with a local (projected) light at the top, without at the bottom, at default 3pm. There are two BIG problems: First, because there is no refraction, the texture behind the glass is undistorted. As the pattern gets more contrast, the glass becomes less and less evident. Nothing can be done about that. Second, with mesh, if you look very carefully, you can see a nasty shading artefact (patches of different lighting) where two glass surfaces overlap. This is very minor in this examp,e, but can be very bad in others. It can be avoided either by separating the overlapping surfaces with a sharp edge, or by making them different materials. More on that here.

Now, you say you want to bake glass. I think that's unlikely to be very satisfactory, because the absence of refraction will still be a problem. You could bake highlights from a non-transparent model, and make the rest of the texture transparent with an alpha mask, but those highlights would look wrong for all except the precise lighting used to do the baking. This might work well enough for small objects though, and doesn't require advanced lighting.

[Kaioni Lyric]

Okay thank you!