refraction problem - cannot find the issue

[waaazoo]

Hi,

I'm encountering an issue I never had with refraction.
I have a bottle modeled with thickness. I have a liquid object. Behind the bottle I have a a window with thickness, and outside I have a sea.
No matter what I do or tweak, my sea renders black (or very dark).
If I remove the bottle glass object, I see my sea through the liquid. If I remove my liquid but leave the bottle glass object, I have the same dark sea issue. I tried to replace my bottle object with a cylinder tube, same issue.
I tried to replace the phoenix sea by a poly plane with sea material -> same issue
If I use a standard vray material on the polyplane sea, I see the sea.
If I add refraction so the standard material, I still see the sea
If I add reflection to the material, my sea is black, even if I remove refraction. It's as if the bottle glass can't "see" the reflection rays on the sea.
I tried to reset render settings, I tried to raise refraction and reflection bounces up to 50 everywhere, nothing helps.
I tried, off course, to redo the materials or to use materials from the Vray Library.

Either It's some kind of limitation or I'm missing a stupid thing. I'm going crazy with that.

[damaggio]

If you are testing in IPR, it has its own trace depth settings..default 5

Sometimes you get into difficult situations , I save a LookDEv tutorial to remind me...like this one is a vintage headlight, glass front, light bulb and chrome reflector.

[waaazoo]

Hi, and thanks damaggio. Sorry for late response, I was away for a few days.
I see what you are saying, but I still don't understand my issue. As I said, I tried even to raise all involved refraction/reflection bounces up to 50, but still the sea, seen through bottle glass + Liquid + window keeps being dark.
Yes, I tested several things in IPR but tried also "normal rendering" as I know that in IPR we have less bounces.

[waaazoo]

ok, by ticking the "global max depth" and putting 50 there, it works. So there must be somewhere a shader or override that gives the issue with the black "not seen" sea.

[damaggio]

50 is a very high number , but it works for you. We would need the scene file to troubleshoot., it’s always good to just include the scene file when posting.

[waaazoo]

50 is a very high number , but it works for you. We would need the scene file to troubleshoot., it’s always good to just include the scene file when posting.

Well, I went down to 12 finally. I know it's easier to have the scene, but it's quite heavy and under NDA. I didn't have the time to create a stripped down scene, but thanks for your help.

[damaggio]

NDAs are always protected when submitted to Support, we do it all the time...12 sounds better for computation time.

[SonyBoy]

ok, by ticking the "global max depth" and putting 50 there, it works. So there must be somewhere a shader or override that gives the issue with the black "not seen" sea.

This is kinda weird, no? If it wasn't checked before then I would think it shouldn't have been clamping your bounces at all. I've always assumed the attr. was there as a means to reduce the number of bounces globally, rather than increase them but presumably this means this override can force max bounces either up OR down?

[waaazoo]

This is kinda weird, no? If it wasn't checked before then I would think it shouldn't have been clamping your bounces at all. I've always assumed the attr. was there as a means to reduce the number of bounces globally, rather than increase them but presumably this is a global override, whether up or down.

yes, that's how I understand that also. But I must have missed something. I checked sea mat, bottle glass mat, liquid mat, window mat, but there must be something else involved.

damaggio yes, I sent also already some scenes, but this file is already more than 1Gb and as I said I didn't have time to strip down. Finally, asking is already great because you find yourself the solution/workaround

[damaggio]

The default Shader max depth refraction is 8 and handles really well in a variety of cases, ( some time ago used to be 5 but it has been increased to 8 in newer versions ...) anytime a surface appears black is related to this and could be solved by increasing this value until is rendering normal, same thing for Reflection Max depth default 8. IPR is 5.
Okay waaazoo...good luck.