Blender Archviz Tutorial: Glass Material | 3D Interior Visualization Course: Part 33 |

hi everyone and welcome to the part in which we are gonna set up the glass elements and windows in our scene so before we do that let's just quickly switch back to the outliner here and enable our windows layer now i'm gonna right click here on this collection and choose the select objects option here you can see we can select all of our windows this way so let me now hide everything except of them by pressing shift h and what we have to do right now is separating the glass panels from the window frames in order to do that we simply enter the edit mode and well this is what's happening and the reason for that is we are using the shape keys so if we switch to the basic shape key here in this huge menu here the shape of the object will be back to its original form but once we leave the edit mode we will see how this model looks with all of those shape key values applied nonetheless if we enter the edit mode we still need to separate those glass elements so let's switch to the materials here we are in face mode and when you click the material the shader ball will highlight automatically for you so you can see if we click around the object the selection here changes let's select one of the glass panels and now let's click this select button here what it does it automatically selects that material within the entire object i'm going to now hit p key and separate this glass panel out of the model we now have to repeat that process to every single window so i'm gonna do it and get back to you once it's all done one important note if your windows were duplicated around the scene as instances when you enter the edit mode you can see all of them highlighted so now if i separate my glass material out of this selected model we will lose it in all of the instances so what you have to do in order to avoid that is duplicating every single instanced window before you do that so i've pressed shift d i'm going to hide the duplicate and delete the original right now shift d height delete shift d height delete now unfortunately i have to unhide everything select my windows collection here and press shift 8 sorry shift h again in order to hide everything except of my windows now with all of my glass panels separated from the window frames i need to do a certain trick so here on the left you will see we have this object options menu and at the very bottom of this menu we have something called cycles settings a lot of people don't know about it so here we can't influence uh the way this particular object will behave within the cycles rendering engine so for example we can switch its visibility to camera to the diffuse ray uh to the glossy rays and so on i will get into those details later in the course in the advanced section of the shaders but for now you just have to remember we only need to leave the glossy and camera options on so let's do it to all of our objects and to give you a general idea how those settings work we will get back to our main camera very soon and we will see how it all works with the area lamps added in the previous steps now when we decide to render the central region of our interior there will be a new situation so you can see right now we have this bright square visible and with the windows disabled it was not here and this is our area lamp we've added in one of the previous steps so why is that happening why with the windows enabled we are now seeing it well the the way those kind of light sources work in blender is if the camera is facing them directly there are invisible but as soon as the light from those sources uh correlates with any objects within the scene they become visible so for example you can see those lights reflected here in the floor you can see them through the window but as soon as i select one of our windows you can see i have the glass panel selected and hide it the area lamp becomes invisible again so now the question is how we can keep both our glass panels and the air lamp visible and the answer to that is the cycles settings we also set up for the glass elements so with my aerial lump selected i can now switch its visibility to transmission so when it passes through the transparent object it's not visible anymore you can see that also changes the look of our scene a little bit so we've lost this nice reflection we had here around the floor it's also visible when i disassemble the windows but we will fine tune that in the final step by setting up the environment visibility in the reflections so i'm going to use a similar trick we have here but it's going to be done using the nodes in the shader setup let's now set up the glass shader itself so we don't need the uv editor here any longer i'm going to switch to the object settings here and select one of our glass panels you can see by default we already have something called choco for glass basic note setup if we hit tab key you can actually get into that note setup and see how it looks so this is something we have prepared uh as our in-house shader before blender developed the principled bsdf shader and to be honest that shader works pretty well out of the box once you apply it to any of the objects so in our case with the ray visibility settings setup like this this could actually work without uh any further changes but let's focus on those glass elements we have here at the staircase i've hidden some of the furnishings just so we have a better view at our element and with when we compare it to the reference you can see here the glass is almost completely transparent and what we have within it are those tiny reflections of the white chairs we have or sorry bar stools we have here so there are a couple approaches to the glass shaders in general when working on the interior scenes i will now show you how i prepare a glass shader for an element like this so let's simply select it go to the shader settings here and create a new material called let's say glass general and for the general purposes we could actually use the principled bsdf shader which is applied automatically the only changes we have to do are the transmission here and the ior which yeah and this is another topic to discussion in my opinion because there is something called an ior table and the ior stands for index of refraction meaning we could theoretically use some of the values posted online as the way as a value in in between in which i don't know how to say it in which the glass bends the refraction that's going through it so we can observe this effect in an image like this for example the straw gets into the glass and then it's distorted by this water surface so we have even two transparency or two ior distortions taking place here and we could theoretically use the values from this table and plug them here as the ior settings for our shader the problem with this is unfortunately it doesn't look good in my opinion and especially in our case this glass surface is very very thin meaning there will be barely any distortion happening but let's see what happens if we just use the value of wine 1.33 which is kind of standard for glass so there's still nothing visible and we need to increase the transmission settings here as well as reduce the roughness and let's maybe leave the specular as a default so if we move around the object let me center my rotation on it you can see those strange artifacts happening this is actually a sun lamp which reflects somehow strangely in this object and here i think we are just getting a little bit too much reflection so let's see how it how the shader looks with the ior value set as one i think it's in my personal opinion and taste i think this little very very slight distortion that's happening that that's actually everything we need within this kind of material if we increase it to theoretically correct values i don't think that looks good it simply becomes well too unnatural in my opinion so let's still work on the brightness just a little bit so we have almost clear transparency and let's reduce the ior to one as i suggested the problem is with this kind of value we lose all of the reflections within the material and no matter how much we increase the specular slider here there's nothing happening so it's strangely the ior value is linked with the reflections of that shader that's why i personally prefer creating very very simple note setup in order to render glass objects like the one we have here to create the setup let's enlarge our window and i'm gonna delete the principled bsdf changer i'm going to press shift a and add a standard glass bsdf which it works if we just plug it in here set the ior to one point 33 and render a preview this will work basically the same way as the shader we just created using the principled bsdf so you can see we have the same artifacts and everything that's why let's reduce the ior to one and let's add a mix shader right now so with the mix shader here i'm gonna add the glossy bsdf shader and this will control the reflections without uh within our glass setup let's just redo reduce the roughness to something very very low like this and switch back to quickly preview our glass material let me switch to the camera actually and see how it all looks let's also apply it here so we finally get what we actually want in our scene so no more shadows in this area um the first thing i try doing is reducing the value color value for the glass bsdf note so it's actually not purely white let's set up something quite high as well so 0.975 maybe um we also might consider switching those things off for the upper part just to get a little bit more reflections here but that's not necessary for all of those objects um one thing you can clearly notice here we have way too many reflections if we compare our shader to the reference but to reduce that using that slider only well that might work or might not it actually works pretty well to be honest but let me also show you a very quick setup that i'm using from time to time to fine-tune this kind of quick glass elements glass materials so i'm gonna add input and layer weight node and plug the facing output to the mix input here what this node does it actually makes this shader less reflective when i'm looking at it straight from my camera angle and it becomes more reflective once i change my camera angle i know it's hardly visible when i'm just rotating within the viewport but i will include a slideshow below this video as well so you can see that effect better um to fully control that node i'm also using the rgb curves and making them just like that so what this point means when i'm gonna face this glass element straight ahead right now i will still get some reflections so let me move this this entire curve a little bit higher you can see the the higher i move this point the more reflections i have looking at 90 percent a 90 degree angle at this element when i really go it go down with this slider the effect disappears so i try keeping it somewhere around this 0.25 value if i switch back now i know it's a little bit too reflective so i can go make this curve quite flat within this area and then make it quite steep within this end of it area so those areas here are those very high angles that i'm looking at from from which i'm looking at this object so if i move this entire curve down you can see the reflections also disappear yeah let's not over complicate it let's just make it like this and i think that's really enough for this element i would even maybe consider uh making the glass just a little bit darker so point 95 maybe so we can now see this glass line here but if we compare it to the reference this is also very very bright and reflective maybe not as much in this area as in our scene but we'll try to fine tune it later let's now unhide the chairs the table and yeah i think i think this looks pretty pretty good as for now um that would be it in my opinion as for setting up the glass what i would also just recommend would be cleaning up the scene a little bit so i have my glass panel selected right now and you can see when we've separated them from the main window frame they took all of the window materials with them so you might consider simply reducing those materials removing them from your glass elements it's not necessary it's not influencing uh the render times or anything in any way but it simply helps you keeping things organized and in place and since we have added various choco 4 models as for the windows you can see the the glass shader is different within some of the models so just to keep it more organized you might consider switching the same shader in all of the glass panels just so when you edit one of them you will have the same effect the same consistent glass look within the entire scene so that would be it as for the gloss setup as i mentioned we will discuss some of the topics some of the things i described in this video in the chapter of the advanced cycles materials covering the advanced aspects of cycles materials but for now i want to thank you for watching and we are going to move on with the glossy materials thank you guys for watching this video is part of my interior visualization course in blender which you can watch for free on youtube all the necessary details and link to the full playlist can be found in the video description if you want to support what i do and access all of the 3d files used in this course plus blender ready interior setups and over 2 000 blender exclusive 3d models just visit the choco for store and learn more about our subscription plans again thanks for watching and i see you soon

Channel: chocofur

Views: 1,250

Keywords: blender, blender 3d, blender guru, cg geek, tutorial, blender tutorial, blender interior, blender interior beginner, blender architecture, blender architecture tutorial, architecture, visualization, interior design, interior visualization, 3d interior visualization, interior visualization blender, interior visualization course, interior visualization secrets in blender, how to, free, archviz, 3d, cgi, blender materials, blender glass, blender glass shader, blender glass cycles

Id: VOtV8laT7QM

Length: 19min 54sec (1194 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021