How do you make a glass shader in mental mill? I’ve been searching around for some basics in getting things running and there isn’t that much available. Here I’ve put some notes together on creating a simple glass shader in mental mill.
Download simple the mental mill shader here
The lerp (linear interpolation) node handles the mixture of the refraction and the reflection nodes. This mixture is controlled by the falloff node using using the fresnel function.
The comp_set_alpha node controls the transparecy of the shader via the alpha channel. Due to a bug in mental mill this isn’t functioning correctly.
Notice that the falloff amount of the falloff node and the alpha of the composite set alpha node are wired to the outside of the phenomenom and labelled as IOR and opacity. These will appear in the 3ds Max material editor with the amounts that are specified here as default.
Here is a mental ray rendered comparison with the A&D pro glass material in max 2010
As you can see the results are quite different. I was surprised to see that the shelled teapot renders much better with the simple glass mm shader than with the pro material. The solid teapot however is much more realistic using the pro glass.
Interstingly, the reflection on the ground plane has much better detail when using the simple mm glass shader on the teapot. The material of the ground plane is a default pro ceramic. You may notice the reflection of the teapots highlight is very bright in the foreground.
The shadows however suffer from being too dark when using the new shader. Something to work on.