Glass material not rendering with transparency using Prorender

[Brian Jones]

by the reflections on the back it looks transparent but it’s hard to tell with black on black like that, can you post the scene file?

[Scott Green]

Sure, here is the file.
13639_prorenderglass.zip

I thought it best to remove the main product as this is for a live project and I’m not sure the client would appreciate me sharing it at this stage, but I’ve left the screen graphic which has a glass object in front of it (which is how I first spotted the problem), then of course there’s the glass ball in there, just so you can see whether the transparency is working or not.

Thank you.

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[Brian Jones]

interesting, I don’t know a whole lot about ProRender but… – the sphere and the Glass are both transparent, I put a checkerboard on the Plane and both are see through. I guess the problem you have is the Face not showing up. It apparently disappears in the render behind the Glass but if you render it with Standard or Physical you can see the Face behind the Glass and in the sphere (you can also see a black patch in the sphere in the same place in prorender as where the better image of the Face shows up in Standard and Physical so it’s working a bit).
My guess (since I don’t know a lot about prorender) is this is a limitation of prorender’s current implementation since they are still working on it or the tiny scale you are working at, the sphere is 0.25 cm in radius and the Glass is 0.001 cm thick. Perhaps Prorender can’t work at that scale (though obviously Standard and Physical can (as can Redshift))
– perhaps someone with more prorender knowledge will know something to tweak in the renderer’s settings

[Scott Green]

I haven’t had much luck solving the transparency problem of materials but for this particular problem I’ve been about to add some reflection on top of the screen graphic material to give it a more reflective look without the glass object in front of it – although it’s not too obvious in this render.

Motion Videos UK – We are creative video designers who bring pleasure, meaning and beauty to our small world through film, motion graphics and animation.