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I'm doing an architectural visualization and I'm using a glass material for the balconies and a fence, but I get strange effects that doesn't look good. It seems that the glass from the windows on the facade that are behind the balconies and the glass fence get some strange distortion!? Is this really correct behavior? Compare the two images.

Anyway it doesn't look nice and I wonder if it possible to prevent this? I only want reflection from the front of the balconies and the glass fence like the sky.

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It looks to me as if your balcony glass has no thickness or the normals are bad. Try either adding thickness (eg, Solidify modifier) or recalculate normals. For a physical glass pane the glass would pass through two surfaces - the front face and the.back face - and would refract opposite ways. With only one surface or with bad normals the refraction is being applied one way only - it's as if everything viewed through the balcony glass is within a solid volume of glass. I don't think that's a reflection your seeing but a refraction of the building through the glass.

Here's an image to demonstrate :

refraction

The right-most example is for 'correct' refraction - where the light is bent towards the 'normal' on entry to the glass and away from the 'normal' on leaving the other side. If the Normal of the back surface is pointing the wrong way (the middle example) then the 'exiting' ray is again bent towards the normal (directing the rays towards your building in your case). A similar situation occurs on the left-most example - where there isn't a back face since the "glass" is only a plane. In that case the light is bent towards the normal but is never bent back - as if the ray remains within the glass.

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