Rendering Glass and Other Refractive Materials in Cycles

Learn how to render realistic glass and other refractive materials in Blender with Cycles

Since the introduction of the Cycles render engine Blender users have had built-in access to physically correct glass rendering. Though it?s significantly faster and more accurate than what we?re used to with Blender Internal, refraction can still bog down render time and confuse us with it?s behavior. This tutorial is designed to be a relevant reference for anyone?s glass-rendering endeavors.

WHAT YOU?LL LEARN:

Kent Trammell will walk you through the shading, lighting and rendering of refractive materials. First you will see how easy it can be to set up a basic glass shader with the Glass BSDF. Then you?ll see how to gain more control by building a custom glass shader with the Refractive and Glossy BSDFs. All along the way you?ll become familiar with optimizing Cycle?s render settings for best performance verses best result. As a bonus you?ll be walked through a brilliant technique for faking believable caustics introduced by Bassam Kurdali on the Tube Open Movie blog.