how to make stained glass?

[Kram1032]

Nah, I don't need it to live. I just like to think about solutions, even if my thoughts might be complete nonsense

Why should he get angry? He actually already though himself about that problem.... His main problem was, how to get a certain point beyond the surface, if I remember correctly...
(He wanted to do it by fading the colour to... erm... grey?)
He also played with papers about techniques to use volumetric textures or to create such textures, simply with 2D images.... But he didn't find too much, if I remember correctly...
One paper was promising, I think, but there was too little info about the technical site, or something. - the basic idea, but not the way to program it...

[Vampyre]

hmm. If i were coding indigo, which i'm not, nor do i ever wish i could (because i'm not insane enough to put the work into it).....

I'd do it the way pov-ray does it. The 2d image would be extruded all the way through the 3d mesh. it would be mapped , like a second geometry, and then the color would go from one side straight through to the other. wouldn't be a perfect solution, but it would be great for anything relitivly flat.

or take it one step further and allow for cylindrical , box , and sphereical mapping that goes from a single axis , projecting the image outward through the geometry. the mesh would make up the 3d volume, the texture would be like... the image you might see if u turned on a projector in a smoke filled room. the 'lens' of the projector could be orthographic, spherical, cylyndrical or boxed.


btw, that was a great colored glass rendering.... here's what i came up with, i found it to be utterly un-inpressive, so i hadn't planned to post it.

[sth]

Nice render
I think colors are too saturated. Adding some dust/smokelike medium should also help a lot. Green and red blocks for me might be darker, and yellow could pass more light.
BTW I like variations of yellow blocks.

[edit]
Is that sun or flat emitter behind the glass?

[Vampyre]

its a sun emmitter, off to the side, but its a transparent diffuse texture so it doesn't matter much. your right about the green and red, but more than that, the design of the window isn't up to par for me. i hadn't thought about dust, that really would have made this image i think. maybe if indigo gets a texture mapped glass i'll re-do the scene with a better designed window and some dust. that would look awesome.

[IanT]

I like the way how it is solved in other renderers (biased). You can treat texture as a shell of transparent paint on your glass

By far the most trivial solution to implement (and not just the preserve of "biased" renderers ).

A 3D volume map would also be trivial to implement with no more memory than the 2D texture, but would need some kind of ray marching algorithm to keep it "real".

Ian.

[Kram1032]

nice oversaturated diffuse transmissive glass