Today I wrote the shaders that model the way glass behaves.

Dorian is already coded as a PBR sorted, multi-pass renderer, so incorporating the new glass system was pretty trivial.

In previous videos, the TIE Fighter’s “glass” was simply represented by non-rendered gaps in the geometry. Now those panels are rendered as actual glass.

The glass calculations include almost everything except cube-mapped reflections. Those are coming later, but they belong to a different subsystem.

The effects of the glass shader are quite subtle in a still image, but if you look carefully, you can see them.

The video below shows the TIE Fighter moving around, which helps demonstrate the glass modelling in the external views. Alas, the internal view has no glass modelling because the author of the model did not include any internal glass geometry.

Concentrate on the left and top panes, and specifically on the TIE Fighter’s glass panels, both on the canopy roof and on the front windows.

That’s it for this fly-by post!

Have Fun!

RobP