Indigo Renderer Forum

Hi guys,

Can anyone explain to me why the glazing in my internal renders is coming out black?

I'm exporting to indigo from sketch up... I have tried reversing the faces and applying the glass texture to the front face.

Thanks,

Adam.

Hi Adam,
If you can post your sketchup scene as an attachement to a forum post, then maybe someone can work out the problem. If you can't post the whole scene, just trim it down to the offending object and post that.

Cheers,
nick c.

Check the faces with the glass, I think they should be standalone objects with glass applied to all sides. Sketchup joins things together all the time, so make them a group of component consisting of only glass.

Another reason could be that your glass mat absorbs too much colour.
Try leaving all of your settings as they're now, and change the SketchUp mat's opacity to 0.

I have the same problem. My glass renders black. I am very new to indigo (i started using it only a few days ago) and I am also inexperienced with sketchup. Can you please tell me what you meant by the mat opacity. Please post a reply using the simplest language you can or a detailed instruction. Thanks.

I would say as above : first thing would be to check that your glass is a fully closed volume, with the same glass material applied to all faces.

Second thing to check : the units. Be sure that your scene scale is physically realistic. If you configured sketchup to work with meters, your glass sheet thickness should be 0.006 or something in the range. In millimeters, this should be a few millimeters. I'ts very important to use correct scaling in Indigo for using the transparent materials and good material reuse.

Third thing to check : download a glass material in the database and save it somewhere. Create a "Linked IGM" material in Skindigo (this is in the material type dropdown list), and link it to the .igm or .pigm file you downloaded. If this works then your own material definition is probably not correct!

I am using the material "Tinted Green Glass" from the database so that can't be a problem. I don't know how to check the thickness of my glass. It looks like its nothing because I have drawn it using the rectangle tool and have not given it any thickness. What do you mean by a fully closed volume. If you mean that it is an enclosed fully drawn shape then yes it is. I have colored both side using the entity info option in sketchup.
Thanks.

If it helps I get the same problem with water.

Jazzy wrote:It looks like its nothing because I have drawn it using the rectangle tool and have not given it any thickness. What do you mean by a fully closed volume.

You need to use a cube with normals facing outside!
A full closed volume explains it self quite well ^^
a 3D object based of polygons that... well... if you would fill it with water, there would be no holes where it leaks out of the object ... a closed volume!

How do i draw a cube in sketchup...do i just draw a rectangle and use to push pull tool or is some other way.

It was the first link on google.

1. Step 1
Open SketchUp. Then use the "Select" tool (the black arrow) to select the human figure you see. The click "Delete" on your keyboard.

2. Step 2
Go to the "Tool" panel and select the "Rectangle" tool. Drag it across the floor of the scene. Doing this will create a rectangle. As you drag, you will see a dotted line extending from corner to corner. If you stop dragging at this point, you have created a perfect square.

3. Step 3
Go to the "Tool" panel and select the "Push/Pull" tool. Click on the square you made, and drag it up to form a cube.

u need to give some thickness to the glass.

Thanks everyone. Sorted it out. I needed to add thickness to the glass.

Hi Jazzy!
For most of the architectural visualizations (read: the simplest ones) you can speed up rendering using thin glass (one of the SkIndigo mat presets), which can be applied to a simple surface, not a volume. You won't generate caustics, but normal windows hardly do that, usually. When using Thin Glass the SU mat slider will tell indigo How REFLECTIVE is you glass: values near to 0 will render as slightly reflective glass, vales near 100 will render with more reflective glass. Try 40 for a "common" glass.