Glass tile backsplash material

hi guys,

i need some help or at least an opinion.

as the title says, i'm trying to create a nice colored glass tile (mosaic) backsplash material. now, i've been experimenting with blend and 2sided materials, even tried the shellac just for fun, but i just can't get the volume effect for that glass layer, if you know what i mean.

do you have any suggestions and is this even doable just by editing the material.

thanks.

ps for the record blend mtl looks best and quite good when not in close-up.

shellac usually does the trick when you want to create a "coated" type of material, other option that sometimes I use is add some FOG in the glass, that create a variation of color depending of the depth of the glass, you can try that too.

for textured glass or glass that has some type of sticker or drawing I start with a box mesh and flip the back face and put there the image or texture, then setup the VRay glass material as single face and play with the fog values. Hope this help

With so many options, why don't you pick an image sample you are trying to recreate?

http://backsplash.com/product-type/glass/

i'm ok with the base texture, i already have that one, it's the glass volume effect i'm trying to produce - as cheap as possible.

so far the "cheapest" solution i found is to use blend material (texture for the base and reflective for the coat) and to add some displacement to it. i guess shellac could do too... making the thin box with the texture on the backside does the trick too but i'm experimenting with the texture only approach (flat surface - no geometry mods).

thanks for the suggestions.

Firstly don't use the shellac material or blend material with vray. They are not energy conserving and besides there is a dedicated vrayblendmtl that you can use to achieve the exact same effect.

Secondly if realism is what you are after, why don't you try modelling the tiles with a thickness so you can apply an ACTUAL glass material to it? There are even scripts out there for doing exactly this, such as the floor generator script, or railclone.

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yeah, sorry, i was not clear, i did use vray blend material.

and i agree that solution based on geometry would, as always look most convincing, however, as i said, i'm trying to get as much as possible from the material.

for example, i have tried something similar: i created two overlapping planes: one with base texture, and the other the glass layer to which i added vray displace with fitting displacement map. and it looks very good and accurate; however it did affect the rendering time, a lot.

thanks.

Well then why not create a hybrid of your way and my way...

Create a rear plane with the base map/material, and use floor generator/railclone/geometry to make glass tiles in front, thus eliminating the need for displacement.