Breaking Glass: Making Glass Texture for Fractured Text

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  • Duration: 08:42
  • Views: 2372
  • Made with Release: 19
  • Works with Release: 19 and greater

It's time to add colours and textures. Let's make Glass look "glassy", put it inside a stylized environment, and light it just by using a single HDR image from the Content Browser.

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Now that I'm happy with my dynamic stimulation, what I want to do is add some texturing to my scene currently, if I press Render you will see that we have grey text on a black background. So let's go and fix some of these things. I'm going to double click and create a background material. Double click on the Material, remove the Reflectance, select the Color, and add a Gradient. Click on the icon and let's make this a circular gradient untwirl the gradient and I'm going to use a dark green color for the outer part and what I'm going to do now is select this one and I will create a lighter version of this color a bit less saturated and it looks fantastic. I'm going to apply to my background by using a Sky Object not a Background Object. I prefer the Sky Object. So create one, call it "BG," for background, "Sky," and then just drag the material on it. You'll notice we had it in the right place with my texture tag active. I'm going to set the projection to Frontal. And you can see we have our nice little circular gradient. Let's render this and it looks great. The next thing is to create my glass material for the text. Double click, double click on this, call this "Glass" and I'm going to double click on this, get rid of my default reflectance, get rid of the color, and let's go to my Transparency. In the Transparency, go to the Refraction Preset and set it to Glass and let's close this and drag it on my Voroni Fracture Object. And let me render this and you'll see that we see some sort of odd background refracting through the text. That's not exactly what I was envisioning. I'm going to go to my Background Sky Object. Right click and add a Compositing tag. And I'm going to make this background only visible by camera. So now you can see that we get the visible by camera and nothing going through or reflecting on our text. For that reason, I'm going to create another material and I'm going to call this "env" for environment. Double click, get rid of the reflectance. Let's go to my content browser and you have to go to little magnifying glass here. And in here type "HDR" and press ENTER. And this will give you a list of everything in your content browser that contains the text HDR. And what I did find was that for my color channel I can put something called HDR12. 11, 12. I think this is it. So click and drag. Drag on this little tab and we've loaded in our color channel. Let's go back to the object manager and I'm going to create a new Sky object. Double click and call it "env Sky." Now I'm going to drag the "env" onto this and I'm going to close this and render and see what happens. Now you can see that we get a more glassy material but we can see the trees from our HDR everywhere inside the text and outside. I'm going to right click here, get a Compositing tag, and remove that particular texture from the direct view of the camera. So now we can see our background and we can see the environment sky on everything else. So let's go and tweak a few things here. First of all, I'm going to set my glass to have a transparency of something like 95% ever so slightly because glass is never 100% transparent. The next thing I want to do is make what we see through the glass a bit more consistent with the background. So the easiest way to do that, go to the channel that holds your high dynamic range image. And over here click on this and add a Filter Shader. This will load a Filter Shader with the image preloaded in the image slot. And what I want to do, is I want to colorize this particular image. Now if I right click here and open a window, I can drag this to the side and I can a slightly bigger view of this image. So now I can say, okay, I want this to be slightly more saturated and I want it to be closer to the green spectrum, something like this. Maybe move ever so slightly towards the blues to get that kind of hue and give it a bit more saturation. And let's assume that this is what I like. Now I'm going to close this, I don't need it anymore, move this to the side, and let's render and see what happens. So we get some sort of color consistency a bit better color consistency between these two. But here's where the problem is. I can recognize all sorts of things here, like blinds, I can see the shapes. I don't want to do that. So all you have to do is where the images, go to Basic and set the Blur Offset to something like 15%. This is going to blur the image and it's going to make it more difficult to see any artifacts. Fantastic. The next thing I want to do is make it lighter. So there are a couple of ways we can do this. Go to the Shader. We can either go and change the Exposure, for example, and make it whither, like that. And this is going to add a bit more brightness in the bright spots because I've increased the exposure. And of course, I can always go upper level to my Filter Shader and change things like lightness or the curves or something like that. If you change the lightness, you may achieve a darker result. If you increase lightness, you'll achieve a lighter results. But things are going to grey out. The way I prefer to do is go to the Gamma. And if I render, I'm going to increase the gamma. Now you can see that we have a much better correlation between the background color and the foreground or whatever is going through the text. Increase the saturation a bit and maybe even move this towards the right. And I think that this now with a small touch up on the hue saturation and the gamma looks good enough. The final thing I want to do is control how much reflection I have here. Here if we go to the glass material and let me render this so we have a direct correlation of what we are actually rendering. If you go to the Transparency you'll see that the brightness is 95%, everything else has a default state. Any reflections are controlled by the Internal Reflections, the Exit Reflections, and if you go to the Reflectance channel it says "Transparency." This means that by default there's some sort of reflection which, although our Reflection channel is off, is going to take part in our render. You can see parts here. Now I'm going to turn this on. And if render you'll see that there's not much of a difference. And what I'm going to do is add a Beckmann here. If I render now, you'll see that it's ever so slightly brighter. And the reason for that is that we've added this extra reflection layer and now by going to the Transparency and changing how bright the transparency is we increase the reflection. So I'm going to go back and set this to something like 94, 95, or 96. I'm going to render. And now our glass looks even better than before. I'm going to add a fake dispersion effect later on in this video and it's going to make our glass pop out quite a lot. And don't worry about this huge mess here, everything is going to clear up and be much better when we actually apply the growth of the fractures. For now, we're good to go.
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