I am using a bubble wrap shader from vray materials. I have shelled the mesh that has the displacement applied to it but the refraction still looks incorrect. Bubble wrap is a very thing material with air inside so I’m not sure how to reduce the bending of light without reducing the look refraction gives. Does this make sense ?
maybe a single sided mesh, without shell, and ior 1?
For some reason I didn’t think IOR 1.0 could work but it has 
Thanks
eh, glad it did I don’t know, it may not be totally “correct”, as I guess, for as thin as it can be, there should still be some kind of refraction going on.. took a look at some soap bubbles, and it doesn’t really seem to be any noticeable “bending” though. this is a reference I was looking at, for example:
I wonder if the displacement on the back of the shelled face needs to go the opposite way then? Rather than getting a thickness to the bubble from your shell, are you getting the bubble sticking out from both sides of your shelled object since vray will displace along the normals of a surface and so you’re getting something more like a sphere?
I didn’t use vraydisplacement mod, I used a turbosmooth mod then a max displace. Then I shelled the mesh after this.
Weird - if it was a tiny shell it should have behave I’d have thought! Sorted either way.
Bubles are extremely hard to model as far as I know. Due to their thin walls and so on. Have a aread http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~iman/SoapBubbles/
Well the best way to do this as far as shaders and refraction, is to model it without thickness, and then have a non refracting material with just the reflection. Opacity only for transparency.
I have tried before to do thin film plastic wraps, and refraction usually spoils it.
This is no longer possible afaik, as the VrayReflect map is missing, and opacity kills the reflection of the VrayMaterial (as requested and implemented a while back).
I seem to remember posting a request on the wishlist for a thin film shader a long long time ago for this reason.
You can still use opacity and reflection of course; after all, bubbles are not 100% transparent and you can always use a Falloff map for the reflection strength. A thin film shader will not help you here at all.
Best regards,
Vlado
Well I just tried, and I’m having a hard time getting it to look acceptable with just VrayMat and opacity. Even with reflection set to white and an ior of 2 and above for the fresnel effect, it still gets too dark and dull.
It was a lot easier back when one could use the VrayReflectionMap.
Try making something wrapped in plastic film (gladpack), where the plastic wrinkles and overlaps itself.
I would, but my modeling skills are next to zero It would be much easier if you have a scene that I can use for testing.
Best regards,
Vlado
Might be something half useful in here?
Those bubbles wont work. They dont even look good now when I look at them. They are missing the intersecting walls.
Can you post an image of your model and what you are trying to archive.
I don’t think you could create an accurate look for bubble wrap with just a shader.
It is to me a very simple transparent plastic shader, the complexity comes from the fact that it is air bubbles inside plastic. For that you need to model it.