Engraved plexiglass

[Tok_Tok]

Hello,

I've been struggling with this for a while now and can't find a solution. I don't even know if it's possible with the corona render engine, but I hope you guys can help out.

I'm looking for a material that can do this effect:




I need the light, that's emitted from the bottom, to hit the engraving on the front side and also make the rough sides glow. I've done a lot of tests but I can't seem to get this effect. How do I make a bump map interact with the light rays that are going through the glass material? And also make the edges emit light. I could of course, give the faces that need to emit light a light material but that does often nog give the right effect in terms of glow effect and colour mixture. So I would like to simulate how this behaves in the real world, but is this possible? And how?

[Tok_Tok]

I now realise that this is posted in the wrong section, please move it to the "I need help" section :)

[Br0nto]

Perhaps make a glass material that primarily uses translucency (like frosted glass), and apply that to to the faces where the text is, as well as the edges of the overall box? That way the rough/frosted material would catch the light, and the rest of the glass would mostly (or entirely) ignore it.

[romullus]

How do I make a bump map interact with the light rays that are going through the glass material?

I think you should try to do that with glossiness and not with the bump. Try to lower glossiness value of the glass sheet edges and letters.

[GeorgeK]

Hello,

I've been struggling with this for a while now and can't find a solution. I don't even know if it's possible with the corona render engine, but I hope you guys can help out.

I'm looking for a material that can do this effect:

I need the light, that's emitted from the bottom, to hit the engraving on the front side and also make the rough sides glow. I've done a lot of tests but I can't seem to get this effect. How do I make a bump map interact with the light rays that are going through the glass material? And also make the edges emit light. I could of course, give the faces that need to emit light a light material but that does often nog give the right effect in terms of glow effect and colour mixture. So I would like to simulate how this behaves in the real world, but is this possible? And how?

Sending you this base scene, with some experimenting and some proper maps eventually you will get there :). Alter values of Self-illumination/IOR/Glossiness and absorption distance. Can be achieved with falloff too but needs some proper testing.

[Tok_Tok]

@Corona_GK
Thanks for the scene, I like the way you used the text so I copied it and made it a lot thinner. That's more the effect I'm looking for. The problem is still that there is a very bright light at the bottom but the top of the box doesn't glow at all. You can see it catches light but it's not bright enough to give a bloom or glare effect. This is not how it behaves in the real world unfortunately.

@romullus & Br0nto
I tried both things but it doesn't work. I tried using a rough material on the faces that needed it and also tried to use a texture as a mask for a rough material. The light does not catch the rough faces like it would in the real world. Make the faces into an emitter works, but I need different colours and lights from different directions to mix with each other and thus give a different effect than just one bright emitter. I did a test with a rough material on the edges but the edges just don't light up bright enough. In the image below I set the emitter to an insanely high value (500.000 lux) and it kind of works but it ends up over lighting the scene. So I included only the box in the lights and that works better but when I turn on bloom and glare I get this superbright spotlight.

 

So you can see the colors of the light mixing, which is good, but again the lights have to be very bright and I'm afraid that's not workable for me. I haven't tried using a falloff effect because that takes a lot of time to get right, I'll see if I can later today but I'm on a tight deadline (isn't it always the case).

[romullus]

This effect depends on total internal refraction phenomena. If you have some time for testing, i suggest try to increase max sample intensity and max ray depth in render setup>performance settings. Don't go too crazy, as those settings affects rendering performance. Also you can try to increase fresnel IOR and IOR of the glass material and if it uses absorbtion, make sure that it doesn't falloff too quickly.

[GeorgeK]

Increase the self-illumination and IOR for edges, also lower glossiness for more glow on the sides :)

[Tok_Tok]

@romullus
Will try this later today. It makes perfect sense what you're saying. I'll do some tests later.

@Corona_GK
I try not to use self-illumination because I'll have to create a gradient with different colour to get the mix effect and also self-illumination quickly changes to a bright white colour. I'll try to play with the glossiness though :)

[GeorgeK]

@romullus
Will try this later today. It makes perfect sense what you're saying. I'll do some tests later.

@Corona_GK
I try not to use self-illumination because I'll have to create a gradient with different colour to get the mix effect and also self-illumination quickly changes to a bright white colour. I'll try to play with the glossiness though :)

True! try with falloff on self illumination too!

[Jpjapers]

This is often made of live edge acrylic which is manufactured Inna way where the internal structure of the acrylic pushes light to the cut edges. It's also sometimes got fluorescent dye inside.

[Tok_Tok]

This specific part is injection moulded polycarbonate and it will be clear, so no colour.

I still need to find the time to take a look at this, will try in the coming days. :)