transparency

using a vray material, how does one get something like glass to be transparent without resorting to refraction?
mh

Toss a VRayColor Map into the opacity map slot and give the color swatch a value, depending on how much opacity you want.

vray color map in the opacity slot.

thanks again…sorry for the basic questions but i am just now getting around to fully exploring vray to use as my main renderer.
mh

Just keep in mind that opacity is actually much much slower than refraction.

I never realized why this happens?!
I mean, opacity should be at minimum like refraction with ior 1 or any other simple computation (pass or no-pass), so I can’t guess the reason of its slowness, any ideas?

a.

It is because Vray is all about raytracing, and opacity is a scanline thing. Doing a refraction with IOR of 1 is much faster. The only disadvantage is that your trace depth may need to be set high if oyu have a lot of level of transparency.

I have had some weirdness with ior of 1 better to use 1.001 (or even 1.0002 ior of air)