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I'm having a material issue. What's the best way to do a tail light? I'm doing this for Arch-Viz so the car isn't the focus but I'd still like it to look accurate. Currently I've got a reflector material applied to the appropriate mesh and a simple AGS material for the plastic cover. For some reason though the AGS seems to be really desaturating the red reflector. Suggestions?

Image with no plastic cover mesh


Image with the plastic cover mesh


-Brodie

How are you making the AGS? I think it just needs to be less reflective -- it's not really so much that it's desaturating anything, it's just reflecting the environment too much and literally obscuring the reflector from view.

JD, that particular material is normal AGS with no adjustments, which comes out with an ND of 20. Setting the ND down to 1.5 does help the coloring but the problem seems to be a trade-off. With no reflections the AGS pretty much disappears.



For reference, here are some samples of, more or less, what I'm trying to achieve.







To me, it looks like one of the characteristics of the plastic cover is that it is indeed quite reflective.

What else can I do?

-Brodie

Well, just keep in mind that tradeoffs are going to be involved, because you are:

a. trying to model something as it never exists (i.e. a single-plane)
b. as a consequence of (a) trying to circumvent refraction via AGS

If you wanted to create a truly accurate image, you'd need to model the lens with thickness, and use a true dielectric material instead of AGS. But that's probably not what you want to do here.

The plugin's AGS is not going to give you much control -- it is specifically supposed to work as well as possible with architectural facades like you'll often see in SketchUp models. So, you will want to use an MXM-based AGS, and in that case, there are two basic factors to play with: Nd and the basic opacity of the material.

If you'd like to send me part of the model, the HDRI, and anything else necessary (jeremy at nextlimit dot com), I can try to play with it a bit here tonight and see what I would come up with.

Actually this model is in 3ds Max rather than SU and the AGS was created through the MXM wizard (rather than the plugin).

I think the environment definately has something to do with it. Running the original AGS (ND 20) with a gray plane underneath and looking down certainly helps. Not perfect, but it may just be good enough. I'll have to throw this in an existing scene when I get a chance and see how it looks in a more realistic scenario.

I will go ahead and send you some stuff though to see what improvements you might make. If you've got 3ds Max I can just send you a scene with the tail light and hdr. Would that work? Otherwise I could transfer that much to SU.



-Brodie

Probably easiest just to send the MXS, with unnecessary geometry removed.