I'm using truespace 4.2 for this, i'm pretty sure it works with any 4.x version. Not much to it, just fucking around with shaders. Turn your render options to Raycast, High Quality (or the glass will look bright white and not transparent), adaptive anti-aliasing.. That's about it.
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first of all, you can't use shadow mapping. well. you can, but you get a opaque shadow. it's retarded, if you shine a shadow mapping light on a glass ball, you get a black shadow instead of the light shining right through. if you can get ahold of one, get a caustics renderer (mental ray). instead of just a shadow, it will create a highlight, like if you held a magnifying glass under the sun. on the left, you see a glass sphere with a smaller glass sphere cut out inside of it. the distortion is visible because of the brick texture and pipe in the background. the more solid the glass sphere, the greater distortion. |
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| ok, here is another example. the far left one is a sphere with a slightly smaller sphere cut out of it, like what a basketball would look like if made of glass. the middle one is just a solid sphere, notice the great amounts of distortion. the far right one is a replica of the far left, only it is slightly tinted yellow, causing everything behind it to look yello. it actually does have a yellow shadow. i used a spotlight with ray shadows. if you used a shadow mapped light, it wouldn't leave any color shadow, just a big black ones. |
| yeah yeah, ok. i'm linking to a material library that i made containing 4 types of glass. use wisely, use when needed. get it here. |