Dielectric Material
This shader is used to describe materials whose most important characteristics are reflection and refraction.
It is most often used for glass, crystal, water, ect. Do the following:
- Assign a dielectric material to the MR material. Leave the values to default.
- Assign a dielectric photon material to the MR photon shader. Leave the values to default.
- Enable Global Illumination in the Render Globals.
- Set the light to emit photons, since MR materials are photon based.
If your sphere appears almost black, increase the photon intensity
until you start to see more of the sphere. Note that only dielectric
object with no thickness are transparent to what's behind them. So
objects behind a plane, or inside the sphere, will be visible, while
objects behind the sphere will not be visible.
Color and Color Out. In the first image, Color is white and Color Out is green.
In the second, the two colors are reversed. Note how the color effect of Color is much more subtle than for
Color Out. For our scene we'll leave both colors white.
Ior and Ior Out.Index of refraction, determined by the physical properties of the
material. It goes from 0 (air) to 2.4 (diamond) and behond. I have not found out what the difference in setting
Ior Out with a value different from 1 is. Our scene will use a Ior of 1.3.
Ignore Normals.Set it if the model is poorly done to avoid problems with strange normals.
Phong Coefficient.Set it greater than 0 if you want a fake highlight event though
the correct calculations wouldn't result in one. The higher the value (100 or more) the more visible and
defined the highlight is. Personally, I don't like the result, so I leave it to 0.
Lights.If left blank, all lights in the scene will contribute to the shader's
calculations. Alternatively, link one or more lights' message to this field to use only those.