Cool Glass Trick

[bobbystahr]

Doing a render which has my flying machine, (Moller Air Car), with a clear canopy. To make it work I put a Water shader and a Reflection shader through a Merge shader; .75 to the glass input and I tweaked the reflection to be soft an have a spreading specularity. Works a charm. When I'm done this render I'll post a clip and a sample render.
EDIT
here's the render....started playing with a crater and noticed the Shader Array shader....that's the glass on the Moller Air Car.

[bigben]

Sounds interesting

[Dune]

Yes, indeed. I wonder what the effect would be, as I think the water shader takes out all color from before and the reflection shader doesn't and thus needs a color 'to reflect from'...

[bobbystahr]

O K, here's the whole thing zipped up, the 6 panes in the border are 20%(.95) clearer than the center one(.75) in the Merge Shader.

[j meyer]

I have to admit that I don't get the advantage of this set up.
It's slow,very grainy,even without the additional lightsource and
reflectivity-wise an overkill.
What are you after? If it's just a variation of transparency strength
it'd be much easier and faster to just decrease it in the water shader.
Mind explaining this a bit?

[bobbystahr]

I have to admit that I don't get the advantage of this set up.
It's slow,very grainy,even without the additional lightsource and
reflectivity-wise an overkill.
What are you after? If it's just a variation of transparency strength
it'd be much easier and faster to just decrease it in the water shader.
Mind explaining this a bit?

j meyer...it's just that I can't seem to get glass with variable transparency with just the Water shader itself and have reflection in the glass that seems to my eyes to be real. If someone could tweak my set up so that I don't need that shader network I'd be grateful...please...this is wasting my time not getting resolved...but maybe I'm just waiting for TG3 to catch up to dead old imagine(RIP 2000AD) which used grayscale maps as filters for transparency .

[Dune]

I gues you can merge the water shader with a masked surface shader or PF (world scale perhaps)? Or multiply its color?

[bobbystahr]

I gues you can merge the water shader with a masked surface shader or PF (world scale perhaps)? Or multiply its color?

I'm at my wits end with this solution...if you'd like to run some ideas through my project I'd be most pleased Ulco. I am on a quest to get coloured rays projecting through a stained glass window(a foolish quest I set myself as it was do-able in Imagine)which is why I keep kicking this apparently sleeping dog.

[j meyer]

What Ulco suggested or you could connect the water shader (and optional refl sh)
to a surface layers child input and mask the surface layer with a PF or an image or
whatever to get some transparency variation.
To get colored rays you have to use colored light sources as far as I can tell from
my own experiments with that subject.There is a short description of a test in
the "Procedural shaders for models" thread,if you like to remember.

[bobbystahr]

What Ulco suggested or you could connect the water shader (and optional refl sh)
to a surface layers child input and mask the surface layer with a PF or an image or
whatever to get some transparency variation.
To get colored rays you have to use colored light sources as far as I can tell from
my own experiments with that subject.There is a short description of a test in
the "Procedural shaders for models" thread,if you like to remember.

There's the rub Jochen, as a colour blind dude I try as much as possible to work with image maps as my actual colour sense scares people, and in Imagine 3D I managed to get coloured light rays in Imagine's volumetrics using filter maps from colour images...I think Terragen could use a look at Imagine's handling of attributes in general as they share many similarities already....

[bobbystahr]

It's a free down load from www.imagine3d.org  by the way

[j meyer]

If you want to have colored rays like a stained glass window would produce
it would be pretty cumbersome in TG even if you were not color blind.
Maybe you could fake the effect by projecting an image onto the shadows of
the colored glass or where their shadows would be.
Have you ever thought about something like a color library for you to use?
You could take samples from photos and paintings.And you could generate
individual color swatches for yourself.Applying some basic color theory principles
should also help,especially color harmony.Basics are valid no matter,if you're
color blind or not.

[bobbystahr]

Jochen...Well I do have a verbose colour library(from the Dare to Imagine book from my Imagine3D days) with the R,G,B, values for reference but for some reason when I try for all my other senses, nothing works out. When I used to paint it would be a matter of do overs so many times I'd wind up with a ton of acryllic on the board and no results..I think for me it's a disruption in the tonality tween similar colours that messes me up..tried a PF grass colouring and it looked awful, not just my opinion as my neighbour came by to check it out and said it lloked like puke but seemed O K to me. He tweaked the colours for a short while and it did look better but I can't say how it was different....sigh

[j meyer]

Do you have similar problems working with black and white?

Anyway,maybe we (the community) should provide some standard
color clipfiles like gras,moss,soil and so on.
A good start would be e.g. Dune's grass file posted recently in his
thread about that park iirc.
Or extracting the colors from the tundra files that come with TG3.
There must be some solution to that.

[bobbystahr]

Well since the advent of the Presets I've been using them as a very good starting point...Thanks Planetside for those....a great and useful addition for the disabled chromatically.