Work with transparency and refractions - KeyShot Tutorial

- [Instructor] Now let's take a look at transparent materials and refractions. So here I have the same scene we used before. And we have a material on this curved object here called material one. So I'm going to go ahead into my material tab and double click on it. And right now I have a diffuse material on it, but I'm going to go ahead and change that. So I'm going to go ahead and pull this down and select glass. And when I do, notice how this becomes clear. Now, this has two controls here. It has the color of the object as well as a refraction index. Now, if I move this refraction index, notice how it really doesn't change anything. And what refraction is, is basically a lens effect. So it will actually make the object curve the light as it comes through. So these objects behind it, this cylinder and this box, should actually have curved edges, but they don't. In order to get that effect, we need to turn on two sided. And when we do, notice how we get this very strong effect. Now, the refraction index can be dialed down. Notice how when I dial it down, this gets a little bit more transparent, but we're still getting a lot of distortion of the objects behind it. Now if I turn it all the way down to one, the object basically doesn't refract or interact with light at all, and it becomes almost transparent. But as soon as I turn it up, you'll notice how I'm starting to get this effect. Now this refraction index is real world, so if you wanted to simulate a specific object or type of material, you can look up the refractive index for that material. So something like glass will be somewhere around 1.5. A fluid might be somewhat lower, around 1.2 or 1.3. Now, we also have additional transparent material. So we have what's called glass solid. Go ahead and select that. And notice how this becomes really, really dark almost immediately. And that's because the color is actually fairly sensitive on this. So if I select this color, you'll see that I'm at about 90% gray. But if I turn this all the way up to almost transparent, say 98 or 99%, you'll start to get that kind of clear effect. And then we can change our refraction index on this, again, to simulate what we want. Now, in addition to this, the glass solid control has a roughness. Now, this roughness will give me an effect that looks somewhat like frosted glass. So that can be very important if you need that effect. Now, we also have another material which gives you a little bit more control, and that's called dye electric. So I'm going to scroll down here to dye electric. Turn it on. And then I'm going to go ahead and turn down roughness here so we can actually see what's going on. And then I'm going to change my transmission color to 99%. I'm going to go almost clear here. And then we can start to see how this works. So my refraction index here is controlling, again, very similarly to how it worked before solid glass. But we also have two other controls. We have a transmission out and a refraction index outside. Now, if I start to dial this up, notice how immediately it goes black. Now, I can get rid of that by turning my transmission value all the way up to 100%. So I want this to be pure white. You can see how I can control how the refraction works on the outside as well as the initial refraction index. So I can get kind of a nice mirror effect. Now, I can also change the color of the transmission out. And you can see how now I can get kind of another, kind of a clear glass effect. So this is just a slightly different effect than you would get with the glass material. Now, in addition to this, we also have roughness. We have roughness for the entire surface, as well as roughness just for the transmission of light through that surface, which is a little bit different. You can get a little bit of a different effect. And we also have this control, which is called an ab number. Or an abbe number, I'm not sure how to pronounce that. But what we can do, is when we turn this up, it starts to give you more of a prism effect. So as you can see, I'm getting kind of a psychedelic effect as it diffracts the light. So this can give you more of a colorful effect or if you're simulating something like jewelry or something that actually has prism-like effects where it's actually diffracting the light into the spectrum this will work. So typically, you want to keep this at zero unless you want that effect. Now as you can see, there is a lot of different ways to work with transparency and refractions in KeyShot. And we have the glass, the solid glass, as well as dye electric. And each one gives you increasing amount of control over the look of your material.