The Ocean through glass through glass

[landrvr1]

lol. I've got an issue with viewing a large body of water through 2 different panes of glass. The camera is placed in the building with the curtain wall glass, then there's a glass railing further back. The problem is that by the time you are looking through through two panes of glass the water is incredibly dark. In reality this isn't going to happen near as much. Any suggestions? Tnx

With no water everything is pretty much okay:


Add the water and things get wonky!


Just one layer of glass isn't bad:


Here's my water settings:

[glorybound]

maybe increase refraction MAX Depth

[alexyork]

As above. You need way more refraction depth to handle that. For each solid glass sheet you need, I think, 4 (one in the front, one out the front, one in the back, one out the back, right?), so if you have several layers etc. then you need to crank it up. You might also need to increase the overall raytrace depth in vray settings. I forget the exact setting name to change, I'm not in front of vray right now.

You might also consider rendering in 2 passes to avoid slow rendertimes.

[alexyork]

Also most glass objects, indeed most reflective objects full-stop, need nowhere near 5 reflection bounces. I don't know why it's the default - it's way way overkill for 99.9% of jobs... I use 2 for everything at most usually, or go to 3 for exceptions. You can use the VMC script to make all scene mats 2 bounces in one click.

[landrvr1]

Yeah, thanks guys. I bumped up the Max depth reflection/refraction at the V-Ray Global switches to just 5 and it solved the issue without any significant rendertime increases.