Poser 8 Tutorials
Lighting / Refraction
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Subtitles of the Movie (Poser 8 / Lighting / Refraction)
Refraction is when you have an object, say this cane that was taken from the Props area of the Library, passing through a transparent object that has some kind of surface inside of it, whether it's air or liquid, or it's like a hard surface like a diamond. Now one of the first things you have to do, of course, is know what the refraction index is for said surface, or atmosphere. So, if we go to Wikipedia and you do a search for refraction index, as I have here, you'll be able to scroll down and see exactly what number you need to enter inside of Poser to get that effect. Now in this case I'm going to go to something like - let's see, what's that fake diamond called? A Cubic Zirconium. So I know to enter 2.15. So I head back to Poser. I'm going to click on the sphere. This is going to be the Cubic Zirconium. I'll hit the Material tab and I'm going to actually have Poser do the heavy lifting for me. I'm going to go over here to the Wacros and I'm going to click Add Refraction and don't forget the sphere is selected. What's going to happen is, Poser is going to be smart enough to realize that this is not a transparent object so it's going to actually make it transparent for me so it can become refractive. So I'll go ahead and say Yes. Now this is going to be transparent. All I have to do at this point is set my index, so I'm going to scroll over and let's take a look at the Nodes that Poser has built for me. I have a Sphere Map, I have the Refract Node and I have a Background color. As you can see the Sphere Map is plugged into the Refract, the Background color is plugged into the Sphere Map, so I can change the colors of these things if I want to. As a matter of fact, I'm going to actually click on the cane and change its Diffuse color to something like a red. Then I'll hit the Sphere again so we can look at its refraction. On the Refract Node you will see the Index of Refraction. By default it's set to 1.2. Now if we go back over to our Indexes here we see that the Cubic Zirconium is 2.15 to 2.18, so I'm going to go back to Poser and I'm going to enter that right here: 2.15. Now when I go back to my Pose Room all I have to do is go to my Render settings and make sure that I have my Ray Tracing on. This is not going to happen without Ray Tracing. And I'm going to go and Render that. What we should have is refraction and we do. The cane bends inside of this sphere now and gives us that refraction. I can always return to the Material and experiment with that refraction number. So I'll go ahead and dial it back down to 1.5 and let's do another render. As you can see, we have a new render here and this is how you can set up a refraction to work with your Poser scenes. This is really, really great when you want to do things like a straw going through a glass, or a person who's standing in a pool of water, or anything that's going to be partially above and below the surface, say a fin of a shark. So, hopefully this will be useful to you. Don't forget, though, Poser is doing the heavy lifting here for this particular instance, but feel free if you really want to, to add your own Refract Node. You don't have to use these Wacros. Simply go to the Refraction Color and click right here and then you can click where it says, I believe, Lighting, Ray Trace, Refract and that's how you can add your own Refraction Node.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Poser 8 |
| Author: | Dwayne Ferguson |
| SKU: | 34076 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-92-0 |
| Release Date: | 2010-01-07 |
| Duration: | 7.5 hrs / 117 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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