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Glass material and thickness

F747fly

F747fly

Resource contributor
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netherlands
Hi everone,

I've been struggling with the idea of making a glass canopy with glass that has an actual thickness. I tried simply using a glass material (as described here: http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threads/fsx-glass-material-realistic-glass.21116/) and making the capony so that it has an outer and an inner layer of glass with the normals pointing in opposite directions. The result however is this weird effect from certain viewing angles:

2017-4-1_12-38-40-735.png


2017-4-1_12-39-16-142.png


Does anyone have any thoughts on how to do this or what I'm doing wrong here?
 
If you want thickness to be noticeable from the outside, you'd have to have normals facing the same direction as to both be visible at the same time (with different textures applied to mimic some variation in the glass surface.) With a solid color material, I doubt you'd be able to tell there were 2 layers, from the external view at least. Also, you may have to change some Z-write and Z-test in the material settings so you don't get any weird alpha sorting anomalies. I'm not sure if the Blender toolset has these exact settings, but there should be something equivalent. If you've followed the exact recipe in that thread, then try changing the Alpha test function from "Always" to "Greater". Also, you're going to need a cube map to really make the glass convincing. I would use a cube map on the outer layer but not the inner one (by controlling it via specular alpha.)
 
I've played with this in the past and it works quite well with curved or bubble canopies. The thickness is noticeably at falloff. As ozzman said it requires that both layers face in the same direction. Exaggerate the thickness for better results. I also found that custom fresnel ramps for both surfaces can enhance the effect.
 
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