water illumination vray1.5 sp2 in max?

[edgemedia]

Hi all, I'm trying to render water in a pool illuminated by underwater lights (like in the attached photo) but, no matter what material/light/render settings (including caustics) I try, I can't get it to work (see attached sample--not very satisfying). Any help will be apprciated. Thanks.

[duke2]

I'd do it in 2 passes, the second pass being the volumetric lights.

[Neilg]

The only way to do it is with a seperate layer for volumetrics I think. It's how i'd do it at least.

[jacksc02]

Is your water mesh a volume?

[edgemedia]

Yes, the water is a volume inside the pool. Tried volumetrics w/o success. Will try them in a separate pass and let you know if it works. You'd think that it should work as a regular caustic effect but I guess we're not there yet...

[edgemedia]

Hello again, thanks for your replies. Here's the final image. Ended up rendering volume lights in a separate pass and using that for the alpha channel to do the lights in post-prod in PS. Not perfect but, as they say, "good enough for government work."

[Morne]

Glass edges

Looks good!

I dont mean to hijack this thread, but I think it might be related. I have glass with light shining on it. In real life the edges of the glass "glow" wheras when rendering it looks the same everywhere, on the sides and on main big surface. How to fix this? An example would be a wall unit with glass shelves and downlight on top or even lights shining through crooves where the glass "attaches to the wood of the wall unit.

[joconnell]

The edges are probably glowing as they've been cut and their surface is far rougher than the perfectly flat glass - they're going to pick up some specular highlights and also because of the bumpy surface give an effect like a glossy reflection - best off mapping the edges of the glass with a slightly different material using a bit of glossy refraction.