Working on a glass material for Blender. by fireangel
Open full image in new tab Members remain the original copyright holder in all their materials here at Renderosity. Use of any of their material inconsistent with the terms and conditions set forth is prohibited and is considered an infringement of the copyrights of the respective holders unless specially stated otherwise.
No AI - This artwork was created entirely by hand or with traditional digital tools.
Description
I've been viewing YouTube video tutorials on Blender glass, and I have combined some of the ideas and improved them further, to make my own glass material that does optical dispersion. This is how glass splits light into the colours of the spectrum, as the refractive index is different at different wavelengths of light. I would not have got every far without those YouTube videos so I haven't got too carried away with my own genius, but in the end I have managed to make a very convincing glass material that is highly adaptable. It renders more slowly than the standard Blender glass BSDF shader, so that should still be used for items where the dispersion wouldn't make much difference to the appearance, but if glass is front and centre in a render I will certainly find it useful.
The object collection on the left uses the standard Blender Glass BSDF shader, the collection on the right uses my new dispersive shader. My shader is not scientifically accurate, but it does look convincing. There are even little rainbow caustics on the surface the objects are standing on, notably by the Stanford Bunny.
Rendered at 3840x1600 in Blender 4.1 (in less than five minutes, even though there was lots of other stuff running — I love my ancient Mac Pro).

Comments (5)
Looks great
So far it looks amazing!
very impressive. At first, I thought it was a photo and was impressed with your collection of figurines. Then I saw the title and the grid floor. You've done a great job
Thank you! The version in this picture actually has a faint yellow tint to it, but since this was rendered I have tweaked the material to eliminate that and it is now ready for use. I am looking for somewhere to make it freely available to the Blender community, so I hope it will appear in the BlenderKit as one of the free material options soon, if not I will seek some other way of making it a free download.
those are really super cool well done blender work.
You've really created a fantastic glass material here! Looks like those YT videos helped a lot. I'll keep that in mind if I ever get time to tackle the big "B."