SF GLASS — procedural glass materials
Starting Frame · startingframe.com

5 glass materials from one procedural generator:
Clear · Frosted · Seeded · Tinted Green · Tinted Amber
Plus SF_Imperfections — scratches, dust, smudges, micro-surface.

100% procedural. No image textures. Nothing to unpack, no missing files.

NEEDS BLENDER 5.2 OR NEWER. Built and tested in Blender 5.2.
It will not open in Blender 4.x, including 4.2 LTS — that's a Blender file
format change, not a problem with the pack.

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RENDER IN CYCLES. This one matters.
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These are built for Cycles and that is not a preference, it is what glass is.
Multiple glass surfaces (a tumbler has four — outside, inside, and the same
again on the far wall) cannot see each other correctly in EEVEE's raytraced
refraction. One pane looks fine; a real object does not.

What that costs, measured rather than guessed. Cycles, 1920x1080, 128 samples,
denoised, on the same shot, against a plain Principled material:

  every glass variant landed within -5% to +6% of a plain material

Read that carefully, because it is the opposite of what people expect: the
glass itself is nearly free. The cost is that it needs Cycles at all — roughly
8x an EEVEE frame on the same shot. That is a packaging fact, not a per-material
tax, and no amount of simplifying the material changes it.


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WHAT YOU SEE WHEN YOU OPEN IT
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five basic shapes, one per glass, lit by Blender's default light. Every material in the pack is already
on an object, so you can look at all of them at once before you use any of them.
Delete the lot once you've had a look — the materials are independent of it.

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QUICKEST WAY IN — the Asset Browser
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1. Edit > Preferences > File Paths > Asset Libraries > +
2. Point it at the folder this file is in.
3. In Blender, switch any editor to Asset Browser and pick your new library.
   You'll see five tumblers under  Starting Frame > Glass.
4. Drag one onto an object. Done.

Prefer not to set that up?
   File > Append > SF_Glass_v1.blend > Material > pick one.

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CHANGING IT — this is the point
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Every material is the same SF_Glass node group with different numbers in it.
Select an object, open the Shading workspace, and the group node carries the
controls: tint, roughness, IOR, frost amount and unevenness, smudge, scale, bump.

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HONEST NOTES — what these do and don't do
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· Tint is on base colour, with no volume absorption. Colour therefore does NOT
  deepen with thickness. On a flat pane you will never notice. On a bottle, a
  thick base should read darker than a thin wall and here it will not. If your
  shot depends on that, add a Volume Absorption node inside the group.

· "Seeded" is named for what it is: relief in the surface, like hand-blown or
  cathedral glass. It is not a smudge. A real smudge is flat, and this is not.

· "Tinted Amber" is named for how it renders. An earlier build called it bronze
  and it was never bronze — it is a warm amber.

· Your object's NORMALS matter more than the material. Glass on a mesh with
  inverted normals renders as a milky opaque solid, and it looks exactly like a
  broken material. It isn't. Check normals first.

LICENCE — MIT
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Released under the MIT License. The full text is in LICENSE.txt beside this
file; the short version is that you can do essentially anything with it.

Use it in anything you make, commercial or not. Sell what you render with it.
Modify it, build on it, ship it inside your own work. No credit required, no
royalties, nothing to report back.

The one condition MIT does carry: if you pass the material FILES themselves on
to someone else, keep the copyright notice and licence text with them. That
costs you nothing and it is the only string attached.

Made by Starting Frame — startingframe.com
