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I am trying to make these Christmas lights and I keep going back and forth between the glass being too transparent and the light being suppressed too much:



Right now it's between the two but there isn't enough light catching on the glass and not enough light is escaping. Each emitter is a simple cube and the glass is a thin-walled mesh with these settings:



I realize that putting a light inside a dielectric object is a no-no but I didn't like the results from trying to fake it with an emitter image on the bulb. It's not enclosed in the actual mesh, if that makes any difference.

Any help appreciated.

You could try with lower roughness, ND to 1.4-1.5 and also see what they look like with glare and/or scattering in MXCL. I would render just one light from close up first perhaps with a HDR so you get an idea how the glass itself reflects the environment. Also if you would like the glass to catch some light you would have to model the glass double sided, but then the emitters inside will cast caustic light so it will take longer to render.

ok - that fixed it but now I have a different problem: rendering at full res just crashes mxcl (32-bit). I'm in OS X 10.5.4.

I should mention that full res is rather large since it's for a magazine spread (5000x3300)

Are you using multi light? Turn it off if you are to save memory.

tried that but it didn't work. I got it to render by turning off some lights - it looks like I'm going to have to render this spread in parts until the 64-bit version comes out...