Glass material for second life

[Laurent Bechir]

Hello 

How do I make a glass material for second life ? I've found videos explaining how to make glass material in Blender, but none specifically for second life. I guess there must be something special to do, since second life has only specular and normal maps ?

Thank you 🙂 

[ChinRey]

I haven't checked it out myself but you may want to take a look at this: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Cracked-glass-case-study-by-Crazy-Mole/5417411

 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

You'll need to be more specific about the kind of "glass material" you're trying to create.

If you just want a clean, shiny window, that's pretty simple. You can literally just use the default blank texture as a specular texture.

But if you're trying to get some kind of distortion effect like frosted glass, you're out of luck because that's not possible in SL.

[Chic Aeon]

6 hours ago, Laurent Bechir said:

Hello 

How do I make a glass material for second life ? I've found videos explaining how to make glass material in Blender, but none specifically for second life. I guess there must be something special to do, since second life has only specular and normal maps ?

Thank you 🙂 

If you are trying to get a "glassy look" within Blender (as in Cycles) you MIGHT try using the GLASS material and then make it transparent inworld.  I haven't actually USED this method but a quick test seems to suggest it might work well. Here is an example layout. Right NOW of course it looks like metal.   So an interesting experiment for ME and I will think about this more when I have a project that can use the effect. 

Good luck 

 

 

IF you have an object that  has an inside and outside (like a drinking glass) you will need to have one material for the inside and one for the outside. The rim could be either.  

Edited February 9, 2020 by Chic Aeon
adding info

[Kyrah Abattoir]

My personal preference for making glass in SL (advanced lighting only):

• Diffuse: Something simple such as the default blank texture, or a white/blue ish gradient, it's better if it's already semi-transparent with an alpha channel as using the SL "transparency" value will tone down the specular/environment effect.
• Normal: Nothing, unless you want to imitate cracked, frosted, or other types of "surface damaged" glass (won't really be cracked or frosted).
• Specular: Default blank texture, and then I play with the Gloss/Environment setting to get something convincing.

In my opinion, there is little point in "baking glass" in Blender or other programs, it's never going to look good for anything but still pictures, a simple material glass on the other hand will look correct at any angle and in any lighting conditions, and use very little textures.

Edited February 25, 2020 by Kyrah Abattoir

[Coffee Pancake]

Glass isn't grey or white, it's the colour of it's refractions. Bake with a low rez/blured custom environment map that matches target location, then fix by adding SL a little sl shiny

[Wulfie Reanimator]

1 hour ago, CoffeeDujour said:

Glass isn't grey or white, it's the colour of it's refractions. Bake with a low rez/blured custom environment map that matches target location, then fix by adding SL a little sl shiny

Fortunately, speculars are affected by the color of the source light. 

[Gwynnaerie Farspire]

My 2-cents are usually worth a nano-linden, but I hope this might be inspirational if not helpful to the OP.  I did the recent Valentine's Shop & Hop and noticed a realistic thick smokey glass tabletop (with a slight greenish tint, but that might have been an effect of other lighting as Wulfie said above.)

The creator was Cory Edo who owns Trompe Loeil.  (and no, this isn't a paid promo, I'm just not easily impressed these days.) The teardrop-shaped table was called "Audrey's" and I found it in his main store as well. As I don't own a home in Sl, I didn't buy it, and have no idea how it was created.  It looked as heavy as that sort of glass would be in RL and I felt it set a new bar for glass in SL.  just sayin 

[Ulfilas Graves]

I saw this on youtube. Might be of help? 

 

[Kyrah Abattoir]

There is so much wrong in this video I'm not sure where to start.

[Melody Martian]

So here's my very late two cents after finally figuring this out for myself. If you want glass that's got all the really pretty light reflections in it like this:

https://gyazo.com/f0ee85b797df3867f2ffb5a7b6907b6d

What you need to do in blender is bake as a fully reflective metallic material using an HDRI imagine or however you like getting super reflective stuff in blender. So, when you bake your texture will NOT be transparent. Then you'll put it into a photo editing software like photoshop or whatever you have and make it more transparent in there. I usually go around 50% or so but depends what you're looking for with your stuff. Upload the newly partially transparent image into SL and keep 'Alpha blending' mode on for the object and bam you're good to go! You could probably get the same effect by using SL transparency but I've gotten better results making the image transparent and then uploading. 

 

Just so you can see exactly what I mean, this is what the exact same object looks like without alpha blending mode on. 

https://gyazo.com/601234ce8e529685622d5fb962bb1325

 

I've been coming back to this forum for I can't even say how long to figure this out and never quite got exactly what I was looking for. This ISN'T going to reflect your environment in SL like real glass would but you could also play around with your glossy and environment and all that if you're looking for something that's a little more adaptive to it's surroundings. 

I really hope this helps someone out!

[Hunter Stern]

I've worked with specular , shiny on transparent, glass , for a long time in SL and have never been satified with the edit settings in as material in SL. I was able to get a good result just using the materials as texures.

 

Edited May 31, 2021 by Hunter Stern
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