NOMERADONA’s Glass Tutorial

For me, one of the complicated materials in Vray Sketchup is the “glass material”. The
reason is you need to fine tune the balance fresnel and refract colors of the Fresnel
reflection in order to have a believable glass. I am using Vray SketchUp for almost three
years now since its beta stage, yet still having difficulties in understanding this type of
material. Therefore, I experimented again and again in order to see how every parameters
work.

Until now I am still not confident enough to write this tutorial, yet I think I found some
useful points which I hope will be found beneficial to everyone. If you have a 3DMax
and Vray Max user, you will realize that glass material is a bit different in Vray SU. I
now therefore share some of this knowledge with you friends. I know it’s not perfect, but
I am sure it will be useful especially to the newbies.

Here is a simple SketchUp file that I will use for this particular tutorial. I created a ball
using vray sphere, and a thick sheet of glass in front of this ball placed on a half covered
room. The sun is coming from the right.

THE GLASS MATERIAL

The material of the glass I used here is a very basic black diffuse color with 100%
transparency. It has default reflection and refraction layers.
Based on many readings and sharing from different sources, I seem to like this balance in
my fresnel reflection.

Fresnel Color… RGB = 210,210, 210

Refract Color….RGB = 40,40,40

Here is the sample render using the above glass setting.

AFFECT SHADOW
As you can see in the above render, the sun is not penetrating on the glass. In order to let
the sunlight penetrates the glass object, we need to tick the box with affect shadow in the
refraction layer. If you are using colored glass, I will advise that you should also tick the
use the affect Alpha.
In this render the sun is now penetrating unto the glass object.

FOG COLOR
To add color to the glass, I wont advise that you we will use the diffuse color, rather we
use the Fog color. Here is my setting for my light blue glass.
Render of the glass with Fog color

FOG COLOR Multiplier

I don’t like much the material above. We need to do something like a glass for
architectural buildings with light greenish effect. To lighten the color, instead of using the
color picker, I will advise that we should control this in the Fog multiplier.

I set the Fog multiplier from 1 to .01

Here is the render
Smoke/ frosted Glass. To make a smoke/frosted glass is rather easy. All we need is to
bring down the highlight glossiness and refraction glossiness, the lesser the highlight
glossiness, the blurry the material reflection. The lesser the refraction glossiness, the
blurry the objects away form the glass material.
USING BUMP
An alternative way to achieve a smoke glass is using bump map. The rendering time is
much faster. Here is my sample setting using Perlin Noise bump with very small scale.
Here I used 0.001. The amount of blurriness can be controlled using bump multiplier.
Textured Glass
By using bump, we could also do different textured glass effects.
EXTRAS

PERFECT MIRROR
Perfect mirror is very easy to achieve in Vray Sketchup. All you have to do is to add
reflection without any Map type…

Of course there is no such perfect mirror, nor perfect glass because of warping, distortion
etc. Adding bump will create such distortion in the reflection. Different bump map added
on this ‘none map type reflection” could further create some special materials.
Some render of ‘None Map type” reflection with different bump map bitmap images.
Some more test render using different bump image.
FILTER COLOR
Of course by putting color on the Filter on the reflection layer, more effects and material
types could be explored. Below is a render using bump and a yellowish color on the filter
box.

And finally a bitmap added on this Filter slot.