Max refraction issues

dfacto

Hey, just had a question about something I'm having trouble with in max right now. Hope someone can help, since I'm getting nowhere so far.

I have a my model set up with a textured body/head/miscellaneous planes, and an untextured head tank that has a raytrace refraction applied to it (as well as a reflection map).

The problem I have is that inside the vat, there are tris with bubbles textured on them. They should be alpha mapped, and actually are until I turn on "fog" in the "refractive material extensions" panel. Then the tris become visible in their entirety all of the sudden.



If I turn off "fog", then just the bubbles are visible, but this basically kills the "brandy in a green bottle" effect that I'm going for. Is there a way to fix this, or do I need to ditch either fog or the bubbles?



2)

Eric Chadwick

Max has all sorts of trouble rendering transparency within a fog. You're probably better off faking the red goo with an overlay, since your viewpoint probably will never go inside the helmet. You could try an inverse Falloff and maybe toss in some noise for swirlies.

My 2 cents... kinda crazy doing raytrace on a low-res model. What's it for?

Mark Dygert

Since you're venturing out of the world of low res by using more advanced materials. Why not just model up some simple bubbles, that way they play nice with the fog... You can even rig up some quick particle effects to make it that much easier and more realistic.

If you plan on going back down to low-res-land you can render out the animated bubbles with the fog by themselves and put that on a cylinder between the glass and the skull.

humm on second thought I THINK fog MIGHT render out as pure white when you render it to alpha...

dfacto

Sorry, should have mentioned that this is for a low poly comp on game-artisans. 650 polys, 512 maps, and no posted restrictions on materials or shader usage. So I just decided to give my model a nice raytraced refraction shader on the glass, since I'm not sure I could have achieved a satisfactory effect without it. I'm already pushing the poly limit here, so I'm afraid adding another cylinder inside, or modelling the bubbles is not really an option. I guess if fog is messed u I might just have o ditch the bubbles.

Xenobond

Look in the helpfile under the raytrace material for 'cutout' This 'should' cut out the alpha'd parts of that geo and won't give you any issues with the refractions.