Vitrium: Advanced Glass Shader For Cycles

by fridje in Surfacing


There are three files provided with Vitrium. They are as follows:

  • "Vitrium_Scene.blend" - this file contains the test scene used to create the marketing animation and some of the marketing images on the Vitrium product page. This is just a normal Blender scene file, provided for the user as a jumping off point to play around with Vitrium.
  • "Vitrium_ASSET.blend" - this file contains a simple scene based on the test scene, and a default Vitrium material. This material is marked as an asset, so when this file is placed in an asset folder added to Blender as an asset library folder, it will appear within Blender's internal Asset Browser. From here it can be dragged and dropped onto a mesh to give it the default Vitrium material. This is intended to be the main way for users to add Vitrium to their own scenes.
  • "Vitrium.OSL" - this file contains the source code of the OSL shader at the heart of Vitrium, and is intended for advanced users. This is provided so that Vitrium is open source, and enables users to mess around with the nuts and bolts of Vitrium however they wish. 

There are two main ways to add vitrium to your own scene file:

  • Before you do anything else, YOU MUST ENABLE OSL in the scene file that you are planning on using Vitrium in. This can be done at the top of the Render tab in the Properties panel: 
    If you do not enable OSL, Vitrium will render completely black. Vitrium works with OSL on both CPU and GPU from Blender 3.5. Versions of Blender older than 3.5 will be CPU-only, and may not be compatible with Vitrium's code.

  • Add Vitrium from the asset browser: 
    Blender's asset browser is very powerful when set up properly and used with a selection of asset .blend files. The Vitrium_ASSET.blend is already set up to leverage this. All you need to do to add Vitrium to your asset browser within Blender is to add it to the asset folder that you have set up within the Blender preferences. If you do not have this folder set up, please see the documentation here: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/editors/preferences/file_paths.html#asset-libraries. Once you have this folder setup, and the Vitrium_ASSET.blend file added to your new asset folder, Vitrium should appear in your asset browser like so:
     

  • Add Vitrium by appending it from Vitrium_ASSET.blend, either as a node group, or as a material.
    Each .blend file you create has its own internal file structure, and this file structure can be accessed and read from within other .blend files. One way to do this is through appending: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/files/linked_libraries/link_append.html#append 
    Once you have navigated to and opened the Vitrium_ASSET.blend file in the Append dialogue box, you will see a set of folders within the Vitrium_ASSET.blend file. The ones you are interested in are Material and NodeTree. Inside the Material folder you will see a material named "Vitrium". If you select this file and click Append, the default Vitrium material within Vitrium_ASSET.blend will be added to your current scene file, alongside any other materials.
    Inside the NodeTree folder you will see a node tree called "Vitrium". If you select this option and click Append, the default Vitrium Node Group, NOT material, will be added to your scene file, alongside any other node groups. This node group can then be added to any material like any other shader node from the shader editor's "Add" menu, either at the top of the shader editor via the shift + A hotkey. 

Choose a product version:

Sales 10+
Dev Fund Contributor
Published 6 months ago
Blender Version 3.5, 3.6, 4.0
Render Engine Used cycles
License GPL
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