Lens Material

Revel

I'm working on a sniper rifle right now, and facing a little problem on how to make a decent rifle scope lens materials.

How to make a realistic looking lens instead of just plug in an opacity maps like what I've showed in this thread? Do we need to create another material just for the glass/ lens? *currently I'm having all in 1 material.

I prefer to add another map type (reflection/ refraction?) instead of creating a new material just for the glass for a better file-organize. Well, I'm not too sure about this, hope that anyone who have loads of experiences working on 3D will help me understand more about this.

Any help will be much appreciated guys

PS: I'm using 3ds Max 2010.

_Revel

Will Faucher

Depends what your plans are for this. Is it going to go in-engine? Or is it for an offline renderer? If it's only for renders and nothing else, Mental ray has some nice glass materials you can use and save yourself some time.

Avanthera

This is not for a game?
then def. go for a separate material for the lens
you can have different ramps attached to viewing angle to give the look of a Lens refracting light, as well as lens coatings, special effects, etc.
If this is for a game,
1 it has an unnecessarily huge poly count.
2 just go for a cube map and reflectivity map.

hope this helps (at least a little)

Joao Sapiro

i think the lens is the least of the problems, but it really depends on the shader you use, just up the gloss and the spec there and make a reflection mask there or use the glossmap as a reflection mask with a nice cubemap

Mark Dygert

For non real time, if you've modeled out the inside of the scope, Put a Thin Wall Refraction material in the Refraction (not reflection) slot and crank up the properties. It will give you the coke bottle distortion a lens has.


http://www.kxcad.net/autodesk/3ds_max/Autodesk_3ds_Max_9_Reference/thin_wall_refraction_map.html

Then you drop a map in the reflection map slot and away you go. If you want the surface to accurately reflect the world around the surface put a Raytrace material in the Reflection slot. It will kill the time it takes to render but will be highly accurate. Also know that a Raytrace material also has Refractive material extensions which help with this kind of effect.

SHEPEIRO

i think gloss map

Vrav

For a realtime lens, would be neat to use one of these. Just thought it was interesting that these two threads popped up next to each other. http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=72528 http://wiki.polycount.net/DuDv_Map

Revel

Thanks guys, really appreciated all these answers!
My plan initially its for a game model, and yea its way too much polycounts right now for a in-game asset.

Currently I wanna build up my portfolio, targeting to apply a job for a game assets creation studio. So what what you see on that other thread, i thought of a hi-poly version, probably for a cinematic use. And after that gonna make the low-poly version out of it for the in-game use, and can show both of them side by side.

For right now I'm gonna do more research about gloss map, cube map and reflectivity map, since I'm not too familiar with these map type.

Thanks again guys!

_Revel