In this tutorial you will learn how to create a realistic glass material and turn our chess pawn into a realistic glass object. Key terms include reflection, refraction, opacity, and fall-off. This tutorial is aimed at the beginner, but since there are several ways to create glass, it might be interesting for everyone else as well. Although this tutorial is based on 3D Studio Max, the same settings apply to many other 3D products.
Note: Click on the thumbnail in each step for a larger screenshot that includes the viewports and the relevant portion of the user interface.
Step 1 Because this tutorial covers only how to create the glass material you need to add an object to your scene yourself. This can be anything from the simple pawn we use (download the chess pawn here) to the sophisticated high detail models you create.  |
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| Step 2 Press the M key to open the Material Editor (or select Material Editor from the Rendering menu) and rename the first material to Glass.
Drag the material to your object in the scene to assign it.
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Step 3
Set the Ambient and Diffuse color of the material to black. And set the Specular Level to 275 and Glossiness to 45. |
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Step 4
Click on the blank square button after Opacity and add a Falloff map. Set the Falloff Type to Fresnel (click here for an additional screen shot).
Go up one level, back to the Glass material, by choosing Glass from the drop down menu (where it says Map #3, see the additional screen shot.)
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Step 5
Now that the main Glass material is select again, scroll down in the Material Editor and add a new Raytrace map in the Refraction slot. Set the Refraction level to 80. |
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Step 6
To make the reflections and the colors smooth, instead of grainy, you will have to enable Supersampling for the Glass material (just above the Maps rollout. Enable the option Enable Sampler and choose a method from the list. In most cases the Max 2.5 Star will do just fine, but if your machine can handle it, you can try others that may give better results. |
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Step 7
You can press F9 now to do a quick render, but it won’t look much like glass yet. First you will need to make some changes to your scene, the environment. Remember that glass is almost entirely transparent and can be seen only because of the reflections of light and objects in its surroundings.
Let’s start with adding a ground plane. Assign it a wood material from the Material Library (we used the default Wood_Ashen). Make sure the plane is large as shown in the screen shot. |
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Step 8
Next, let’s makes some changes to the environment as the glass will need something to reflect. You can add object and a sky and such yourself, but for the sake of this tutorials an environment map will do. From the Rendering menu, select Environment (or press 8). Click the big empty button below Environment Map and select Background_Mountains (or any other background) from the Mtl Library. |
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Step 9
If you render your scene again, you will see it will look very different and really “glass-like”. However, there are ways to make it more realistic. You could start by enabling the 2-Sided option for the Glass material. This will allow us to see the inside of the model. Click the thumb on the right for more info.
Render again, and notice the difference, if any. The results won’t always look good, depending on the model. |
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Step 10
Let’s try another trick I like to use to make the glass more realistic, although it will make the glass object a hollow object (which is fine for many glass objects and often even desired). Select your object and press CTRL-V (select Copy and click OK) to clone it. Apply a Push modifier to the clone and set the push value to -0.5 (try other values after rendering to check which works best for your model). |
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Step 11
In the Material Editor make a copy of the Glass material and name it Glass Int. Make sure the option 2-Sided is enabled for the Glass Int material but disabled for the Glass material. Assign the Glass Int material to the clone and make sure the original Glass material is assigned to the outside model.
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Step 12
Render again (F9 or F10) and notice the difference. You should end up with something similar as shown on the right. The actual result will depend mostly on the geometry of your model and its environment. Try out different background and check out the results.
This concludes my glass material tutorial. Thanks for reading!
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I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and that it contributed something to your skills and knowledge!
This tutorial is created originally for 3Dvalley.com. You are not allowed to redistribute this tutorial in any form. |
this tutorial is very very nice……….really useful to beginers
Pretty cool and useful tutorial; congrats.
cool, thanx for help… now its more looks like glass…
Wow, that is exactly what I was looking for, thanks a lot!
hi,tnx for this work
thank u……….thank-u
its a very very nice tutorial and its very helpful to all beginners.
I suffered for two days to make a frosty glass from other tutorial,but with this ive done it in 20 minutes.
thank you
Still a good tutorial after all these year. Thanks
is there a reason why it looks black then i render its glass im trying to do an animation with it but cant please help
thank you so much..
this is very-very helpful.
But in the end of this tutorial, (cmiiw) it looks like a pawn from acrylic than glass…
perhaps, more shinny and clear needed..
how?
bro ur good…keep up..thanx…
Thank you so much for this tutorial. I’ve been looking for a easy but good glass tutorial for ages. Your’s is the best one that I’ve found.
Thanks
Omg.. The best of the best… this is the most usefull tutorial for beginner that i see in the web. Thank you so much for share your knowledges.
Thank you so much, FROM PERU!
Thank you very much, it(oops!!) helped a lot.
Excellent tutorial! Much appreciated!
Awesome! Coolness! Thank you so much sensei! exactly what im looking for! really easy and fun!=) the rendering went slower though, bec of all the refraction etc(and a inferior hardware).. but this tutorial is big big help!! thank you again! =)
Hi this is a great tutorial but one thing,
I get these sharp blue pixels across the cup for some reason can anyone help, there mostly on one side? Other than this it looks great but I need to get rid of those blue lines!
Theres nothing in the scene that is blue it is rather odd. Please help asap!
Also what does the push modifier do?
that’s gud
Thank u too much i got it from u ^^
good tut!
but i do have a question.
what about shadows?
i used a box to design a door, and a omni light from the side . but when rendering , i get a shadow like if its not a glass at all..
what to do??
Very simple and useful tutorial and well presented
Thanks.
Very good tutorial. It looks great but iwas wondering if it would be possible to change the color I am tring to make obsidian?
hay thanks yar it very vary nice……
well presented, thanks
thanx for help its really nice
cool and useful tutorial…now its more looks like glass…
Thanks a lot. I was looking around the net for some useful glass material and I found this useful tutorial. It easy to understand and it really help me alot in my assignment. =) thx!!!
thanks for providing step wise procedure.
big thanks it helps a lot
thanx a lot dude…it was a great help…
thanks
thanks
its nice and helpful for me
Why when i am rendering, where are white flash the background of that poly becomes black, other surface that are dosent reflecting any light on surface look very good. The light difraction inside glass look good too. But when i make for example a sphere there is a black squares on top of it whit white flash
What i am doing wrong?
thanks! for teaching a excellent model
if u have some more tips on lights effect, how to set alight, pls show me
thanks for these very informative and easy to follow tutorial.I’ve searched a lot, but this is one the bestI’d ever seen keep on posting of different techniques.Thanks!!!
Thanks U so much!
Such nice n easy tuts.
great is just that im loking for thanks man, you are a crack! its a great tutorial a needed todo a tube for chemistry
thanks again
Awesome tutorials for beginners……..
THANKS SO MUCH
IT WORKED SO WELL
IM SO HAPPY I CAN NOW MAKE GLASS VERY WELL
YAYZIEEZZ
… Woops, I forgot caps was on..
LAWLZ
AGAIN THANKZZZ
Great, easy to follow tutorial. Thanks for posting!
Thank you very much
It,s really good and easy as well so keep doing this awesome work
Works like a charm.
Although I would have loved to know how each of those parameters affect the material.
thanks….but i couldn’t understood how to give raytace to the object….
i am very enjoing for reading this tutorials ,thank you
Best tutorial,helpful to starters and fresher for making realistic glass texture.
nice tuteriol i make the glass first time. its very usefull . thanks for this tuteriol
Useful information. Lucky me I found your site unintentionally, and I am surprised why this coincidence did not took place in advance! I bookmarked it.
I used 3DS Max 2012 and this tutorial worked fine! Had to switch from the slate material editor to the compact material editor, ut worked like a charm!
The rendering took ages, but was worth the result 
Awesome tutorial, used it for my 3D Modelling Alleyway scene at Uni 
Other websites are just full of technical jargon and fancy words, this tutorial was so clear and the screenshots were really helpful. I like the red boxes around what needed to be selected, most other tutorials just give the screenshot and do not outline where to click. Thanks for this 
I was going to get a texture and make an opacity map on Photoshop, but this saved me a lot of time! Thanks again 
great and thanks ……………
seriously a vry good 1 for the beginnrs like me !!!
Thanks for the tutorial, I just used the teapot object and it looks pretty good.