Realistic glasses
Today we are going to make glazing for the facade of a high-rise building. We will use a little trick for this, to make the glasses realistic. Let's learn a little theory and practice in 3d max.
It's pretty easy to make glass material, you probably already know how to do that. Enough to make the transparency and reflections to the maximum. Some 3d artists know that glass is uneven and add a noise map to the bump slot of the glass material. And it's true, the result visually becomes much better. Nevertheless, it still lacks a lot of realism. Often artists experiment with adding dirt or glare, or tweaking the IOR setting... It doesn't always turn out exactly as you want it to. However, the secret to realistic glass is so simple that you can easily do not only the glass for a single window, but all the panes of the facade of the building at once. Here you only need to know how the glass unit on the real windows. The glass unit comes in single, double and triple.
Perhaps the most popular insulating glass unit is double or single glazing. It consists of two panes of glass, with a vacuum, gas or just pure air with less pressure inside than outside. The glass panes themselves are secured around the perimeter with airtight adhesive. Given that there is no support in the middle of the glass, it deflects inward slightly, a little closer to the center.
The distortion on the glass itself is due to this deflection, that is, due to the effect of the vacuum inside the glazing unit. And this distortion looks much more natural than the distortion with the noise map.
That was theory, and now let's try it in practice.
Let's create an ordinary PLANE - it will simulate a glass facade. Let's take the standard material, turn on reflections and slightly increase their value in the IOR parameter, so that in our tutorial the reflections will be more evident.
Now let's connect a map to the material:
1. Gradient Ramp.
2. We set the Gradient Type parameter to Radial.
We set the color values in the same way as on the image below.
We set the Blur offset to 0.5.
And at last, step 5, we connect this map in Bump.
Now on our PLANE (this is our glass) we add from the modifier stack UVW Map, check the option Mapping on Face.
This helps us to break up all the polygons separately, and as if put these polygons on top of each other, no matter what size they are.
As a result, we get the correct distortion of the glass in our windows. But we can add even more realism! In order to do that we'll change a little the color of each of the glasses. To do this, we can use the 2 map channels on the texture and the additional sweep.
How to do this?
1. Let's start by copying the Gradient Ramp we created earlier.
2. Let's change the Map Channel to 2.
3. Next we need to adjust the color a little bit, in order to see the difference between the panes.
4. Select another modifier in the modifier stack, this time Unwrap UVW.
1. Let's set up Unwrap UVW.
2. Let's change the Map Channel value to 2.
3. Open the UV Editor.
4. It is necessary to select all the polygons (maybe at first it will seem that the polygon is only one, but it is not so. You will see that there are a lot of polygons, they are superimposed on each other).
5. With the one-click Pack button, the polygons are scattered randomly across the UV. Each polygon takes a part of the gradient.
This is the result:
Knowing how to do this, then you can turn on your imagination and experiment to your taste - add, for example, dirt, smudges and other effects to make the windows more realistic. Your renders will look much more professional.
Once you've mastered this tutorial, you can then do it quickly and easily. And, of course, with much better results. This method is also applicable to other render engines, not only in Corona Render.
Have a beautiful render!
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