Glass Material By Neil Blevins Created On: June 19th 2002 Updated On: Dec 11th 2024 Software: Blender or 3dsmax (vray)
Here's a tutorial on how to create a basic glass
material.
Reference
Here's a casserole dish in my old kitchen. Notice this glass is tinted
glass.
Software Agnostic Material
The basic ingredients are as follows:
Shading: Regular Diffuse and Spec
Diffuse Color: Black
Spec: Fully Reflective, 100% gloss, IOR 1.6
Refraction: Fully Refractive, 100% gloss, IOR 1.6
Ways to make it more realistic:
Add a triplanar map of smudges in the spec to show small
variations in reflectivity.
Add a bump that shows small knicks and scratches using a
triplanar projection map.
Add a large wide bump to show larger warble in the glass, see
this tutorial: Flat
Metallic Surfaces
Remember, half of what makes a material
look like a particular material is the environment it's in, especially
if it's highly reflective.
A wise person once said reflections only look as good as the
environment the
object
is reflecting, keep that in mind.
Blender Example
Here's the shader for Blender...
Since Blender has its own specialty glass BSDF node, this is the one to
use, and hook it up to your Material output.
Then the Color is set to white (fully refractive and reflective).
The Roughness is set to 0.0 (unless you want frosted glass). IOR is set
to 1.5.
Here's the resulting render.
To get tinted glass, just modify the color, adding a slight tint to it.
For the Specular Reflection, set the Reflection Color to white, keep
gloss at 1 (unless you want frosted glass) and set the IOR to 1.6. This
will create
slightly glossy medium intensity reflections.
For the Refraction, set the Color to white, leave gloss at 1.0, set IOR
to 1.6, and check affect shadows so the refraction affects your shadows.
One final note, there's two "Max depth" values, this is the number of
times a light ray bounces around inside a refractive object before it
stops. High values are more realistic but take longer to render. I
usually reduce mine a bit, but put them where you'd like.
Here's the resulting render.
And here's a tinted glass alternative. Set the Reflection and
Refractions colors to any color other than white.
