glass alternative, for liquids ?

I was wondering with cycles, is it possible to create a liquid like material, beer or so.
That has reflection, glow, but yet at the same time is transparant, breaks light, but without the mini pixel noise glass shader has. I was mixing glass, combining it with with volume shader. but i keep getting small specs noise from the glass shader.
i’d like to get rid of that.

Can you post pictures showing what you have?

It’s likely you are seeing fireflies. If so, try using the clamp options on the render panel to get rid of them. As a starting point, set indirect clamp to around 2-3 and direct clamp to around 8-10.

well i now clamp the indirects, and with some extreme render level i get rid of the noise now, but this really way to extreme i think.
I’m now rendering on my octocore, even using adaptive sampler branchelevel set confidense to a high level to get the liquids good, but now i’m halfway an image after 6 hours of rendering on my octo-core… its a bit bizarre such long render times to get something like glass like liquid good. I update this thread when my pc is done with the render work its still bussy for at least another 6 hours i think. Then i will show my material and render settings, and examples… but as for now i cannot touch the pc untill it is finished rendering.

Are you using an experimental build? (you mentioned adaptive sampling which hasn’t yet been committed to trunk).

6 hours seems rather excessive. What resolution is your image, how many samples.

Even with my quad core i7, 480GTX setup - I can get clean looking glass/liquid in minutes rather than hours. Unless you are lighting completely via caustics - you should be able to get clean renders in less than 1000 samples.

yes i’m using that thrunk, but i do understand how it works; so its now configured to do a lot of samples on complex parts, and it does less samples on easy tiles. So the effect is the water tiles that are complex take a lot of time, while the easy tiles like the background rener quickly. After 12 hours the water was good :)…
But i do think that it should render faster

My liquid was like this (node setup as for petrol as in my final product ), but when choosing blue i got more like swimming pool like in the material test i did, final image is still marketing material cant show it.
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The whole scene was quite large, an outdoor scene. And the petrol had to be noise free.
I kinda wished from some transparant ~glossy ~refracting material, without the extra efefcts that glass seam to ad, i think basically for i wanted it was enough to refrect, shine on surface, and be transparant with transperancy getting less when it gots deeper. absorbtion did that last trick.

The displacement part causes the waves, its not a mesh wave.

What resolution are you rendering at? 12 hours seems excessive unless you are rendering at very high resolution (or have a dinosaur computer)

For example - I just copied your node setup above and tried to replicate the scene in the bottom right corner of your screen capture. I lit the scene with a HDRI environment map with MIP enabled, 500 samples at 1024 x 768 resolution and direct/indirect clamp set to 10/3.

The scene rendered pretty cleanly in 2 minutes 25 seconds on GPU (Geforce 480 GTX) or 10 minutes 6 seconds on CPU (Quad Core i7 870 2.93 GHZ)


Of course - without seeing more details of your scene - it’s impossible to know what could be going wrong. Have you tried rendering the scene with just the normal or branched path tracer - rather than using adaptive sampling. I have seen some settings in the adaptive sampling thread that have resulted in much longer render times.

If you are using a HDRI environment - make sure you have MIP enabled in the world panel. Can’t really suggest anything else - even if you use the refraction material mixed with a glossy - you are going to get similar render times to using the glass shader.