From the course: Maya 2026 Essentials Training

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Transmission and refraction

Transmission and refraction - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya 2026 Essentials Training

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Transmission and refraction

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- [Presenter] Rendering transparent surfaces can always be a challenge in any renderer, but let's take a look at how to do it in Arnold. So here I have this basic scene, and let's do a quick Arnold render of it. And you can see that, well, I don't really have any transparent materials assigned. So let's go ahead back to Viewport 2.0, I'm going to select the glass and the sphere, right-click, assign favorite material, open PBR surface. And that brings me into this rollout here, and I'm going to rename this, let's just call this glass material. To get transparent surfaces, you can do it in one of two ways. One is the kind of cheap way and one is the actual way. I'm going to show you the cheap way first, and that's under the geometry rollout you have an opacity, and you can see that you can just dial up and down the opacity of that object. But if I go into Arnold and render that, you'll see that, well, it doesn't really look like glass, it really just kind of makes the surface…

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