HOW CAN I CREATE A SIMPLE GLASS MATERIAL IN BLENDER?
Beth Newton, Middleton
There are different ways to approach the creation of a glass material in Blender, and the very first step is to choose the render engine we plan to use: Eevee or Cycles. Here I’m going to show you a really easy way to create a simple glass material compatible with both of Blender’s render engines.
First of all we need to select the mesh where we want to apply the material. Go to the Material panel and add a new material, then open the Shader Editor panel and check ‘Use nodes’. We can now start to create the material. In the Shader Editor we can delete the Principled BSDF node, since we are going to use an easier, procedural method.
The key element of this material is the Glass BSDF shader, which will be linked to the Material output. The other two elements are the Gamma filter and the Noise texture (included in Blender). These two elements are linked to the Roughness of the Glass BSDF shader, which will help us change the surface of the glass.
At this point we can start to set the parameters of these three elements. In the Noise texture I suggest you set the scale between 50.000 and 75.000 (this will define the size of the liquid stains we want), after that I set the Detail up to 3.000, the Roughness to 0.300 and kept the Distortions at 0.000. In the Gamma filter I set the Gamma to 2.000 to achieve a more transparent effect, and at the end I set the IOR of the Glass BSDF shader to 1.350, which is the most accurate value for this kind of material.
Now we’ve created the glass material which is ready to be used with the Cycles render engine, but if we want to use the same material with Eevee (the real-time engine) we need to change two elements in the Editor panel in the Material Properties. So, once we have switched over to Eevee, we need to change the Blend Mode to Alpha Blend and the Shadow Mode to Alpha Hashed. Now you have to repeat this process for the material of the liquid inside the glass, and then you are ready to start rendering!