Blevin’s Ray Trace Glass using Mental Ray

Import the file into Max 6.

You will see some teapots and reflection cards. Dropper sample the small card to study the Output material in the diffuse slot. This will give us nice bright reflections.

Objects to reflect are essential with glass, chrome, car paint, etc.

Create this ray trace material and apply to the teapots. Go Standard button/Raytrace to start.

Diffuse goes to BLACK

Transparency goes to WHITE [or any other color if you want colored glass]

IOR 1.5

Spec Level = 0, glossy = 0

Note -- Raytrace settings and raytrace global settings are disabled when mental ray is activated.
[Local level settings of a raytrace material/map will work.]

Put a FALLOFF map in the REFLECT slot

Falloff type = FRESNEL

IOR = 1.5

You can go ahead and render this in the default scanline renderer. the will be artifacts and it will be slow. We could fix it with supersampling, but let’s go ahead and do something in mental ray. Activate the MR renderer.

Do not turn on Final Gather, Global Illumination, or even caustics, as we are not setting up shadows in this scene.

In the renderer panel, set type to Mitchell.

Note – increasing width/height will soften the image.

Turn on jitter as an option, as it helps fight any anti-aliasing problems.

You should get a nice rough pass. Make any changes you want to now.

Turn up the sampling to 16 and 64 and re-render. This will take longer.

Try another approach ... make a new material and apply to the teapots ... hit the Standard button and get this material:

Change the top color to white ... it is currently a very light green:

to

The render has a lot of complexity:

One more ... make a new material ... in the mental ray connection rollout at the bottom, unlock surface ... add lume glass there.

Leave settings to the default.

Here is a render of the default lume glass: