Hi,

i am trying to create a glass/transparent plastic material like in the following photos (mental ray)

http://www.gunsmoke.com/motorcycling/k1200rs/sold/images/bike_dash_large.jpg

http://www.stevehv.4hv.org/boost/meters2.JPG

I don’t care if it’s plastic or glass...whatever looks better in 3ds max :) .

I tried tweaking the Promaterials and Mental ray meterials but with no luck (the speed meter behind the glass looked unrealistically dark and generally it didn’t look like a small transparent panel - the edges of the panel were non existant/unrealistic.

Any idea how to approach such materials?

Thanks!

I haven’t actually tried this myself yet but I would probably suggest trying a thing glass material and then if your looking to add those scratch marks as well you can add a bitmap to the diffuse, you were saying that the speed dials looked unnaturally dark, if you want to fix that try brightening the color on the diffuse I know that always worked for me

Intel Core i7 CPU 960 @ 3.20GHz
Windows Ultimate 64 bit
ATI Radeon 5900 Series
3DS Max 2011

Thanks for the reply. I guess my question was too vague so i’ll try to be more specific.

I applied the mr glass presets and the glass looks good. When i move the glass object in front of the dashboard and i render i realize that the glass is too perfectly clear so it looks like there is not even a glass there. I tried to blur the glass a bit/ use other glass presets but all i manage is to darken/blur the object behind the glass as if there is no glass at all again.

So my question is what are the details/tips that i should be aware of to have a realistic glass and make clear to the observer that there is a glass there without distorting the object behind it?

(add some blurry spots/dirt perhaps?)

Try moving your light slightly to get a little bit of light reflection on the glass. There was probably some of this reflection before you moved the glass into position, and after you moved the glass, the angle of the light was different so the glass looks clear?

3ds Max 2013, Windows 7 pro 64bit.
MSI NVidia GeForce GT240, 1GB DDR3 (Driver 286.19).
i7 2.93Ghz , 16Gb CORSAIR Vengeance RAM, DX9.0c.