CMYK globes

[sublimationman]

I consider myself low on the totem pole here but I thought I would share one of my latest projects. It's simple but I am happy with the outcome.

These are globes representing CMYK printing inks, these will be used to promote some of the full color printing companies. It's just a unique way to illustrate the use of CMYK full color printing.

I have been trying to get good looking glass and have been failing big time. I have gone through a dozen dielectric tutorials and it would seem to be strait forward but I am just not getting it. Anyway I played with this glass for hours last night and finally dropped the nodes and just used transparency and reflections to get what I wanted.

Compared to some of the other tests I did this looks great.

[lwanmtr]

Have you checked to make sure the colors are true cmyk?

for a simple glass, I throw incident angle gradients on the reflection, transparency and refraction channels. making the transparency never above 99%. set refration to 1.1, then you can play around with the gradients to get what ya want.

Another addition is to add a math-scalar-fresnel node to reflection channel set to 1.52.

I have only used dielectric once, so I cant say much about using that.

[sublimationman]

They don't need to be true CMYK, these will be used on posters, web sites and such advertising. It's just a way for the companies to say we print in CMYK to the potential customers. It might also be used with some ink jet cartridge companies.

I did play with incident angle with the dielectric in node editor, got close but not what I wanted. I did not try it with the regular settings. The transparency on these is only 89% if I remember right. And I was using 1.2 then 1.1 and finally 1.0 refraction, the problem is that the ink inside was looking like it was higher with refraction on, and since there is really nothing behind the glass (other than the ink) to refract I just left it at 1.0.

I have never tried the fresnel node. I have only been playing with nodes for a month or so off and on so I have a lot to learn yet. In my mind I fell like I know what the settings should be to achieve the desired look based on what I know about how the nodes work. However what I think they should look like based on my settings and what they really look like are two very different things at this point :-S

What I need is a few hours (or weeks) with William Vaughan. But he is to busy and I could never afford him anyway ;-). I would be lost without his tutorials.

[lwanmtr]

Yep, his vids are great

[Sekhar]

IMO most of the magic with glass happens with the environment. Below is a simple model/render with dielectric (IOR 1.5) and default everything - all I did was add a HDR for environment. This render is with everything off, but you can add refraction and reflection if/as necessary. If this looks interesting, check out the attached model/scene (replace the images with your own).

[sublimationman]

Yes I have noticed glass tends to look much better with a black backdrop. I of course wanted white and the edges of the glass would disappear into the background. That glass looks great.

[safetyman]

Sekhar is spot on -- You can have the best node setup to resemble glass there is, but if you don't have an environment to reflect, it won't look right. The best renders depend on the best render setup, not necessarily the best textures.

[sublimationman]

Thanks guys for all the help. As soon as I get done rendering a set of projects I am working on I am going to use this info to do some more testing.