Bad glass window

john2 · 4 Jan 2012, 10:55

im trying to render a louvered window in sketchup. the glass is coming as pathetic. i edited the sketchup blue translucent material to reflective [fresnel]. the effect isnt coming as that of a glass. what is wrong?

LOUVRD WINDOW SCF.skp

thomthom · 4 Jan 2012, 11:15

Your Diffuse layer isn't fully transparent. That will make the window appear somewhat dense.
If you want a tint to your window you can have some opacity, but not a whole lot. (And this is only if you have glass made out of a single face - "fake glass")
Your glass has a refraction layer. The refraction layer can be used to tint your glass with a colour if you like, and more realistic. But you need a "thick" glass. You need two surfaces - otherwise it'll look like what's behind the glass is inside a solid lump of glass. This is due to how refraction breaks the light beam.
You have set the multiplier of your reflection map to 4 - not sure why - or how much it affects anything. But I don't quite see the need for that.
Consider that what you see of glass is mostly reflection - so when you render glass in an empty scene you're not really going to be getting much of out. Reflections only really work well when they have something to reflect.