OTOY Forums

Am I missing something about getting smooth glass on an object that has wall thickness? It seems that you have to subdivide extremely high to not see any tessellation and even then it is still somewhat apparent. Is the solution to this something basic I am missing? I feel a little dumb but would love to find out what I'm missing here.

Did you check "Smooth" in the "Basic" tab of your glass material?

Yes, smooth is on.

I've made high poly versions with different geometry in zbrush with the same or similar effect. Its not till I subdivide and smooth REALLY high that it starts to disappear but that doesn't even really do it.

Double polys? Mesh not closed? Phong angle? Change "Subdivide UVs"? Did you try Check Mesh?
If the mesh is from a different program - does it consist of triangles that don't play well with Sub Divs?

Hard to say without a scene file ...

I'll create a file to upload later tonight with a few examples, but I feel like I've checked all those things. Is this a problem that just I am having or do other people out there have the same issues when creating glass with thickness?

Exactly you don't need to use very high subdivisions. It may be a problem with mesh normals or scaling of model.
Question: why don't you test it on simple object which is built by lathe?

No problems here. Left one is the standard spec material created from the LV, right one is the fake falloff glass.
Lighting via HDRI environment.


Both are really low poly.

Thanks for the replies!

I knew it was going to be something simple I was over looking and I'm now pretty sure it was the smooth button. It didn't work at first but after a restart it smoothed everything out. I'll double check on my projects at home to but I think that was it. Argh, I feel dumb.

haha

I can upload scenes later but heres a little experiment I did. The one on the left is a sphere with a deformer and the one on the right is a zbrush retopology of that sphere. The material is the same but the smoothing effect is not working on the retopologized one. Why is that?

can you display shading normals i n LV?