Hello everyone and welcome to the second part of the Glass Guide. To bring some structure to the matter, I will divide the individual episodes into categories. So this part is only about the production of normal glass and crystal glass, as used for drinking glasses or bottles, for example.

First of all, you should always make sure that the „normals“ are aligned. With glass shaders in particular, incorrectly aligned „normals“ can lead to display errors that look very unattractive.

In the following video, I will show you how to create a glass shader. In principle, not much different from the first part, but you have to make sure that you set the „Value“ value in the base color to „1“. It is also very, very important that you do not set the „Roughness“ value completely to „0“, but to a value between „0.005“ and „0.01“. The reason for this is that no transparent material is completely transparent in reality. We imitate this digitally, so to speak.

Another very important point is the refractive index, for „normal glass“ a value of 1.5 is exactly right, but if you bring crystal glass into play, as in my scene, then you have to increase the IOR value to „2“. The difference can be seen very clearly in the video.

Next, I will reduce the „Density“ in the „Volume Absorption Node“ a little, as the color is a little too dominant for my taste. A little tip on the side: If you want to depict liquids in a glass or bottle, reduce the size of the contents slightly, as can be seen in the video. This will prevent the liquid contents from sitting directly on the inside wall of the glass or touching it directly, which could also lead to slight display errors.

Some glasses have a dispersion effect, i.e. a kind of oily film like a soap bubble. In this video, I show you how to create this effect and combine it with the glass shader.

So, that was the second part and in the next part I will show you how to create a realistic architectural glass. At the end of the series, I’ll give you a few more tips and tell you more about glass in general.