Glass On The Dancefloor - Making of This is meant to be a quick "how-to" inspiration, I don't want to see a thousend copies of my own work somewhere. I will explain how i made this image, because i get asked for this quite often. First of all i use 3DSMAX together with splutterfish's free beta of their renderer "BRAZIL R/S" (beta 0.1.3). Most ppl fail because the lack the determination to work something through, they can't be bothered to read the manual, or give up upon the first obstacle. The Brazil demo comes with a few demo files, looking at those you can deduce the working and settings needed to create caustice and glass. I like the scene "brazil_gi_example_02b.max". In this version of brazil caustics can only be created with objects that have an selfilluminating material applied to it (here: a plane box), and then function as a light source. The object that is to cast the caustics has to have the brazil material applied to itself (still a bit buggy with 0.1.3). I used the materials and settings from that scene and set up my own scene with my robot. So my initial scene looked like this: the slected plane is the lightscource and the robot made of glass will cast the caustics on the box underneath him - simple, camera in there as well. A first rendering: the thing is colored because the applied selfillumination map was a spectrum, just btw. What i did not like was the visible light-spot, better visible in the black/white view, caused by the position of the light-scource-plane. Altough i did some manipulation in ps, the results were not satisafctionary. I wanted an even illumination. I tried a few postions, like right above the object, but then the caustics would not cast very far. The light has to come fron some angle. I tried some more... The next best thing i could come up with was an arrangement of a few orbs that would be the lightsources: topview: leftview: perspective: the render looked like this: With this and a few other renderings (alpha channels, rendering of different materials) i started to optimize the image in ps. These were my layers: quite a few, but bragging with the number of your layers is never an argument for a good image, nor does it make one, but many people finish their work with the push on the rendering button, although the images could be much better if some details were changed... oh, and my alpha channels, never leave the house without them: don't even try to mask something by hand! ...and don't smudge your renderings. This is the endresult: ...nominated for a Deevie for technical Excellence in the Wallpaper category, over at deviantart.