5D.Glass

PURPOSE
Glass simulates the refraction caused by a sheet of glass whose thickness varies from point to point. You can visualise its operation by thinking about what would happen if you took a photograph and placed a ripply sheet of glass some fixed distance above it then looked through the glass at the photograph. In our case, the 'ripples' in the glass are precisely controlled by the luminance of an image, which in effect determines the thickness of the glass at every pixel. You can get all sorts of watery and lens-like effects by choosing the control image appropriately.

Tips: if you do not want to use Chromatic Aberration or Light Brightness always make sure they are really set to 0.0

INPUT CLIPS
Glass: the sheet of textured glass to look through.
Behind: the image to be viewed through the glass.

GLASS
Black Height (Min: 0.000 Max: 10.0 Default: 0.1)
Glass thickness corresponding to black in the Glass image. The units are multiples of the image width. i.e. for this purpose, the image is considered to be 1 unit wide.

White Height (Min: 0.0 Max: 10.000 Default: 0.200)
Glass thickness corresponding to white in the Glass image.

Index (Min: 1.000 Max: 10.0 Default: 1.4)
Refractive index of the glass. The higher this number, the more the light will be bent.

Smooth (Min: 0.0 Max: 30.0 Default: 0.0)
Specifies the smoothing factor to apply to the glass height image. Since this image can only have 256 distinct levels, 'steps' can become visible in the output image. This is because finding 'normals' to the glass surface is very sensitive and picks up very small changes in brightness. This control sets the spacing between points on the image (in pixels) used to calculate the surface normal. If you want a smooth result (e.g. you have modelled a lens with a suitable grade image) you should increase this until you see no stepping effects.

Chromatic Abberation (Min: 0.0 Max: 100.000 Default: 50.0)

Adds color distortion if values are greater than 0.0
Note: if you are not using chromatic aberration effects make sure the value is set to 0.0 to it turn off and speed up the processing.

LIGHT
XY position (Default: image center)
Sets the XY co-ordinates of the light source.

Z position (Min: -100.0 Max: 200.0 Default: 50.0)
Sets the Z co-ordinate (height above the image plane) of the light source.

Glossiness (Min: 1.0 Max: 1000.0 Default: 45.0)
Sets how sharp the specular lighting highlights on the glass surface will be. The higher the number, the tighter they will be.

Contrast (Min: 0.0 Max: 100.0 Default: 100.0)
Controls the relative contrast of the lighting highlights and the image seen through the glass.

Brightness (Min: 0.0 Max: 200.0 Default: 0.0)
How bright the light is. Values over 100.0 will start to burn out.
Note: if you are not using lighting effects, make sure the value is set to 0.0 to turn off the light and speed up the processing a little.

Red/Green/Blue (Default: white)
The light color.

Invertglass (Default: Off)
Off=0: the glass height map image is used as is.
On=1: the roles of black and white in the glass height map image are reversed.

Fill Mode (Default: Edge Duplication)
Controls how areas of the output image are filled if the required location is outside the input image area.
Edge Duplication=0: repeats the contents of the nearest edge of the input image.
Black=1: fills input image regions with black. This is often useful, and looks most like real glass (where you get total internal reflection).
Wrap=2: treats the input image as an infinite repeat tiling, so regions that would be just off the left hand edge get mapped to just in the right hand edge for example.