glass material

[LArch]

I'm trying to create a glass material. No transparancy, a little bit reflective and dark grayish.
The template architectural glass looked like it was the best of them, but it's almost a mirror, so reflective.

Question is. Where do I control the reflection amount of a material?

twrender.jpg (49.98 KiB) Viewed 8856 times

EDIT:
Found a suitable template, had overlooked the architectural 'common' one
Question remains how to control the reflection amount of a material.

[Fletch]

a darker color in the Architectural "common" (aka "Thin Glass") will cause more reflection, raising IOR = more reflection. lowering IOR= less

[Gaieus]

When we are at it (and hope I don't hijack the topic); how does IOR and shininess relate?

[Fletch]

IOR = Index of Refraction, it is a scientific number relating to the angle light is refracted as it passes thru an object.

Shininess is the smoothness/roughness of a surface. 50000= perfect reflection 7=as "rough" (matte) as looks good in Twilight in my experience. by "rough" I do not mean to imply that you will actually see the 'bumps'... unless you have applied a bump map.

[Chris]

Shininess governs how sharp the reflection is. A smaller number is a more blurry reflection, a higher number is clearer (Mirror uses 10000 I think).
IOR, index of refraction, governs how much light bends when entering a transparent material but also governs how much light reflects off the material based on the viewing angle. The wider the viewing angle, the more reflective a material is, and IOR effects the amount of reflection as well as how much the reflection changes based on changes to the viewing angle.

From a practical standpoint, shininess governs how blurry a reflection is and IOR governs how much of the object's color is in the reflection.

[Fletch]

so, the closer an object's IOR is to the number 1 (IOR = 1 = Oxygen/Air) the MORE of the material's own color you will see in it's reflections.

as I would prefer to think of it... "Index of Reflection"
as IOR increases, you increase the reflected color's visibility.

be aware that IOR will look/react differently depending on the material template used. (metal vs glass for instance)

[Gaieus]

Cool, thanks both. I feel wiser now (really)