Glass not rendering with bump maps, can't get ribbed glass to work.

    Searched high and low and can't seem to find anyone else with this issue.


    According to this thread I should be able to apply a bump map to a glass texture and have Enscape show the relief on the glass:

    There's something wrong with transparency


    However, no matter what I try... I cannot replicate this. Adding a bump map to the glass does nothing - I can only see a perfectly smooth sheet of glass. If I turn my transparency down to 5, the bump map finally displays, but the "glassiness" of the texture is completely lost.


    What am I doing wrong? Attached is the image with transparency set to 5, which has the ribbing show but isn't translucent at all.


    I experimented with using cutouts to achieve a "ribbed look", which at least gets me to a point where I can see through the ribbing, but again - it doesn't look like glass at all, and at oblique angle the ribbing cutouts block all light and the glass turns to looking black. For what it's worth I also experimented with using transparency masks but these also did absolutely nothing. The only thing that Enscape is capable of rendering as glass-like for me is only 100% perfectly smooth glass. This is a big problem as privacy/ribbed glass is a pretty common design feature I'd like to show off.

    This isn't a glass-effect bump map though right?


    I tried using a cutout mask w/ a matching bump map then using the paint tool to add this "ribbing" on to a glass panel like in that guide, and while this worked to achieve 2D ribbing that reacts with light, the light doesn't diffuse through it properly because Enscape doesn't treat the bump map/cutout as a glass-like material. The result is Enscape fully shadows the ribbings, causing the entire glass panel to look dark - especially at an oblique angle, where it completely blacks out.


    I'm looking for a way to achieve a true bump map added to glass, like what was somehow achieved in the first link I posted.

    skhayward

    Try lowering the Bump amount. you'rs is set really high and additionally, by setting it to over 0,500, it's set to displacement mode.

    Your bump map is quite tiny and detailed, so these strong details on small space look very noisy in your example. Try setting it to 0,100.

    Also, your Transparency seems to be sett really low (just 5? try setting it up to 90 or so if you want real glass)

    Does that improve the look?

    I had set it that high just so I could see what the extremes of the effect are. The transparency is set to 5 because the moment you go above 5, you lose the ability to do a transparency mask or a bump mask - Enscape renders the entire pane as smooth glass, and the only setting that matters at that point is the glossiness setting.



    The best I could do is the below - but as you can see, all that it is doing is applying a "ribbing" decal that doesn't refract light like glass would. The glass is far to dark & noisy still too, even though I'm using a smoother mask. Everything that is glass-like about the material is completely lost until I set transparency above 5... but then I lose all of the ribbing.


    Since I run off of Revit 2018, I'm beginning to wonder if for some reason Enscape is incapable of showing bump maps on glass unless I'm using Sketchup or Revit 2019+? Seems odd though since revit's renderer supports this functionality just fine, and I can get Enscape to show displacement maps on my version! I only say this since in this thread, the user was able to get a proper bump map to show on glass perfectly fine with Revit, something I cannot do:

    How to apply a decorative film to glass in Revit

    Use a PNG file with alternating transparent and dark sections Not white and black. Then add transparency to the image. See attached samples. Closer? Revit file here:https://www.dropbox.com/s/ehi8abn9sm7yxgj/Test.rvt?dl=0

    I've managed to get it looking close to what I want with some tricks + adjusting the ripple transparency, but its still not really as good as what a proper bump map would be like in the threads I've linked.


    I've embedded a modeled-in-place (just as a test) pane of glass inside the glass I'm painting with the ripple texture. This new glass uses the revit "glass sheet" material template that lets me specify roughness, which enscape reads. The combination between the internal rough glass pane plus the painted "ripple" material is a pane of glass that looks like it has ripples, and also reflects light as glass should. However it's not perfect - for some reason, Enscape doesn't render the roughness-effect on objects in the foreground (such as on the sill of the window), which means the dark ripple material shows through very clearly where the sill is, breaking the illusion. Also, I still think this workaround still renders the glass way too dark.


    However, I've also discovered that if the roughness is over 0.60, Enscape switches to a simpler way of handling reflections that multiplies the light at oblique angles... which actually helps the glass + ripple glass combo look a lot brighter & more realistic, IMO. If roughness is below 0.60, I get much more accurate reflections, plus I don't need to have the the rough glass be quite as blurry... but then the glass is too dark again at oblique angles. I'm still deciding what I like more.


    The first picture was with the internal pane of glass at 0.60 roughness and 10% reflection (any higher quickly causes the entire pane of glass to white out!), the second picture was that same pane at 0.59 roughness & 50% reflection.