How to get sharper gloss with transparent material?

Hi!

I have this dessert package with transparent lid. I managed to make it transparent and have some gloss on it too, but i want to make sharper and more visible gloss without losing the clear transparency on it.

I tried to google any help, but only found materials made with glass. Glass doesn’t work with this, since it makes the candies under the lid look funny and distorted.

Any suggestions?



Glossy results highly depend in the enviroment lightning! So, a carefull light setup will greatly enhance your reflections.
As for the material, plastics normally have more reflection when seen from the sides… this is not truly a fresnell function, but layer_weight can be used with tweaks. Using fresnel/layer_weight as a factor in your mix can produce better results.
Another thing is the geometry, which I find too rigid for the material you’re wanting to achieve. A smoother bevel can make it more realistic.

Hey that’s just what i’m trying to get! Still no good luck though… Now my lid has black edges or is not transparent at all.
I’m not quite sure what “mesh is set to be invisible to shadow rays” means in practise (where should I pull the line from the shadow ray to?)


Look closely at the bottom (green) node setup: The “Add” value is much too strong. Use something like 0.025 - 0.075! The Add node is to ensure that the material always stays a little reflective, even when viewed straight on. If you add too much of a value with the Add node, the gloss will totally overpower the transparency.

For the black rim in the glass: What does your environment look like? Could this be some black background being reflected/refracted? In my render I didn’t use the Light Path node at all, btw, but simply disabled shadow rays in the Object > Ray Visibility context tab:


Your setup with the Light Path will work, too, of course. It’s just about preventing the glass from casting a shadow on everything behind it.

Are all objects in your scene in “real world scale”? 1 Blender Unit = 1 meter. While Blender is pretty much size agnostic while modeling, rendering in Cycles depends quite a bit on objects being reasonably sized.

Aah, too much gloss! And my object was over 2 meters wide! :smiley:

I think this looks better now, thanks to you :slight_smile: There are still some dark areas on the lid, but propably because of my poor modeling skills. I never made the lid with thickness in my mind, just that flat mesh. When i added the thickness, it made the wireframe look weird.




I just have make new lid… (I made spheres and use boolean modifier to do the dents - wrong way to do it maybe?)
This is what inspired me in the first place:

Duh, i was making the dents way too hard! This is more simple version, and looks better too :slight_smile: