Hi I was wondering whether I was the only one to ever run into this or not. I am using XSI 7.0 and am trying to render a fish behind a piece of refracted glass. I am using a simple transparency map (black/white) for the fins to make them semi transparent. The problem is they appear to be taking on the reflection and refraction effect of the glass and so the fins are reflecting and refracting when both of these settings (reflect/refract) are set to nothing.

If I hide the glass the problem dissapears. I tried upping the reflect/refract pass numbers but it doesn;t change it.

If anyone has any advice please help me out thanks!

Jason

well since no one has responded to this question I feel like I should let you all know it must have been some kind of bug from loading a 5.5 version file into 7… I replaced the glass and all seems fine, except now my refraction amount does not seem to be doing anything great. I have the refraction set to 2.8 and yet the visual refraction does not seem to reflect the value I have set.

Any help?

Hello Jason,

I’m by no means an expert, quite the opposite, but since you’ve mentioned a fish behind a glass and problems with refractions, I assume there’s a chance you might be rendering some sort of fish tank. In such case, you’d also have to compute the water refraction (since light travels through water at a different speed than through air) and you should also be watchful on how to separate the geometries (glass>water>glass) in regard to proper normals direction.

I’d suggest you download this document from mental images and read through topics 1.7.4.2 on (keep in mind this applies to mia material only).

This is a little test I did some time ago while trying to figure out the whole refraction/reflection thing:

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Good luck with your project!

Leo.