chippwalters
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New Universal Glass Material: Both Cycles and EEVEE!
🕑 Added 2021-05-31 03:23:45 +0000 UTCHey everyone,
I've been studying 3D Glass for some time now. Many of you may already know about my free glass EEVEE materials on Gumroad, and also in EEVEE Materials and the free KO-Materials (comes with KIT OPS FREE and PRO).
But, I've never been that happy with all the defaults, and it seemed to always need tweaking, and especially the Glass BSDF has all sorts of problems in both EEVEE and Cycles. So, I studied a lot of different approaches that are out there, including my own, and performance tested them, and then decided to craft the "cw-glass-universal" material. And I'm sharing it with you all here. It will probably be part of another KPACK some time, but for now, just drop these two files into any KPACK folder you already have and you're good to go.
This one materials automatically adjusts for either EEVEE or Cycles-- and the interface, as you can see, is really easy. I've set it up with a default RGB of .97,1.0,.97 so that is has just a tinge of green in it, just like real glass has imperfections. You can of course adjust the color and roughness as well.
One of the great things about this material w/regard to Cycles, is the fact you can set the shadow transparency. The shadows created by the BSDF default shader are way too dark. There's also volumetric lighting as well, which is just like real glass.
EVEE users REMEMBER! You must turn ON both Screen Space Reflections *and* Refraction in your EEVEE render controls!
Also, some of you may notice the EEVEE glass defaults to a 3.0 IOR, instead of the standard glass 1.45 IOR. Well, EEVEE is a actuall a lot of "tricks" to create the illusion of reality-- and this 3.0 setting is just another one of them! You can of course change it back or play with the IOR, which will make the glass more reflective as you increase it.
Now, the EEVEE glass doesn't do very good really thin glass, (you can see in the table top)-- that's quite difficult. Try reducing the IOR if you want more transparency. Also, neither of these glass materials create dispersion effects. I tried it and it was too large a performance hit for too little gain-- and in fact most of those dispersion effects would occur most often in crystal and jewelry. I may create another "universal" material for dispersion at some time.
Also, neither of these would be considered "Architectural Glass" which is mostly for windows and allows pretty much full transmission with light reflection at severe angles and renders lightning fast (so it's not *that real*. I may create one of those later as well, but I don't think I've ever had the need to use it.
I hope you enjoy it and holler at me if you find a situation where this doesn't work well for you (it's still considered a 'beta' material)!
BTW, I've been reworking my "EEVEE Materials System" to make sure they all work with Cycles, so now I need a new name for them...thinking about calling them "Designer Materials System" -- let me know what you think.
6/3 UPDATED the material, removed volumetric from EEVEE shader as it was causing some artifacting.
Comments
Michael finbarr-smith
On more vote for the name unimat system. Has a nice ring to it
Stephen Vidal
Looks great @Chipp_Walters and I love suggestion of "Universal Material System" @Steffen_Meier
Asyouare
Oooooor....a little more japanese "ULTIMATEMASTERMATSALLWEEKSUPERFUNTIMEGOGOYOUCANDOIT!!!!"
Asyouare
What about "Universal Materials System"?"Cross engine Materials" "Cross Render Materials" "Universal Render Materials"? "UniMatSys"
Chipp Walters
Yeah, those are good points. These are specific materials that most people just want to use. Those are some good names. Thanks for taking the time to think on it!
Anthony Aragues
"Quick Materials" "Cross Engine Materials" "Drop in materials" Materials make a big difference quickly, it's a whole area I dont have time to learn but I want to use. I keep running across people in Discord that are unaware it exists. When I see reviews of material systems they usually recommend the gigantic packs that take GBs to download with huge textures
Chipp Walters
Hi Lyne, yes, that was one of the references I used to create this glass material.
Lyne Frappier
Thanks Chipp! You may or may not know about this presentation done by Vilem Duha at the last Blender Conference (2019 I think) - it's called Everything you wanted to know about rendering Glass not only with Cycles. This is like a bible for glass rendering and very interesting to watch - the guy knows his glass. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv2wqwsvx-8&t=1035s
