some glass troubles

[3dgirl]

hi

not sure if this is the right forum to post in..am making a logo in glass, the glass should ge the highly polished glinty kind with lots of reflections but also still quite transparent. It should have quite hard edges to catch the light with extreme glints, rather than being to curvy, so I don't really want to subpatch.

i have been following a few glass tutorials and have given my onject an inner "air panel" the same size as the "glass" panel(refraction 1.52) but with a refraction of 1. however this gives me the very see-through, non glinty and quite dull form you see on the bottom right.

when i scale down my "air" panel slightly inside the glass panel, it gives me a thicker, nice glinty glass look, but almost too thick- you can't really see anything through it (refer the other 3 pictures).

also, if I don't subpatch, even though I've subdivided quite a bit and got smoothing turned on, you can see the edges of the polygons in places as well as getting some severe artifacts even at higher antialising settings.

does anyone know how i can avoid these without subpatching (to still keep those hard edges)? also how to make the glass look more transparent while still keeping it super-reflective and glinty?

thanks! anna

[Phil]

If I understand this correctly, this is one of the side effects of Lightwave not supporting edges. As such, the best you can hope for, with subpatched models, is to try and apply a very closely spaced bevel to the outer faces of your model and then apply weightmaps to the outer points to try and sharpen the faces up to give the glinting effects you want. You may find that the knife tool or additional bevels will be needed to get the look you are after.

If LW supported edges, this kind of job would be easier, but at the moment you will simply either have to live with the polygons showing up (even at high levels of subdivision you will probably see them) or subpatch and use weightmaps to try and influence the sharpness.

[3dgirl]

thanks phil,

good to know I'm not doing anything wrong, will have to try and make the subpatched model work for me. if anyone has any tips on getting glass "just so" I'd love to hear them!