Best setup for glass on OSX

What is currently the best setup for a glass material on the OSX platform?

From this my previous question and other threads I get reflection on translucent materials won’t probably be available in the near future, but from other questions (e.g. Reflections/specularity on Translucent materials - Rendering - Unreal Engine Forums, https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/81537/reflection-captures-not-working-on-translucent-mat.html) I don’t really understand what is available right now and what not and on which platforms (SSR? realtime reflections? shading from reflection capturers? highlights? these effects with dynamic or stationary lights?)

Could someone please clarify?

Is there any workaround (e.g. using cubemaps and precomputed textures) to fake some kind of surface reflection or highlight? Any kind :slight_smile: I don’t really need accurate shading, and in many cases even a workaround just for planes of glass (e.g. windows) would be sufficient.

Just to avoid completely flat shading of glass materials, like this:

alt text

…which is how all glass objects in my projects looks like now!

Got some success using cubemaps in the diffuse and emissive channel, anyone knows if it is possible to access the environment cubemaps generated by the reflection capturers and manually use it as a texture?

The only thing that works on ShaderModel4 platforms (like Mac with its OpenGL 3.2 drivers) for reflections on translucency is a single reflection capture cubemap assigned per-object (when translucency lighting model is Surface) and the skylight reflection. The assignment is automatic based on the center of the object.

Hi DanielW, I tried setting up a scene with a glass object (when translucency lighting model is Surface), a reflection capture sphere and a skylight, but still I don’t get any kind of reflection (see screenshot attached)
What am I missing?

Great, that has been bothering me for so long!! Looking forward for the fix, thanks!

That’s definitely a bug, I’ll add it to our list and hopefully we can get it fixed soon.

I looked into it and turns out that was never implemented for the SM4 path that OSX uses. It is now! will be in 4.5.

Yeah!! :slight_smile:

…no, really, amazing news! :smiley: This is really helpful :wink: thanks!!