Arnold glass transparency with ocean

[pietarivisanti]

Using Max 2021 with latest Arnold 4.2.1.4. Many of my images have ocean and now I can do it OK with displacement and it looks the way I want (as it does here in the middle). Now I ran in to a problem with ocean seen through glass. All the other materials look alright and slightly darker when they are behind glass. Only the ocean (on the left and right) looks milky and lighter and ocean has also lost the displacement texture, or at least there is less of it and weirdly the texture is a lot bigger and coarse.

I tried both glass physical material with transparency and Arnold standard surface with transmission to  1 and then played with all the other knobs but the results are not good. So what should I do to get better glass transparency ocean? Also I put more transmission depth to arnold settings but that didn't help either.

[madsd · Accepted solution]

Remember to enable specular transmission for auto bump.

Your details are not displacement but auto bump.

[pietarivisanti]

Thanks, that was what I was looking for. I was just looking for it in the material editor. The only option was just to check the box (so the ocean displacement auto bump transparency settings are like 1 or 0 and nothing in between) and the result is a bit dark but certainly better than before.

I also put a second skydome for HDRI sky (as cloudless physical sky background is nice but a bit simple) and there was more options for transparency. The HDRI contribution settings of: Cam: 1,0 / Diff: 0,0 / Spec 0,0 / Transmission 0,5 produced a result that was ok and somehow similar to other parts of the image.