Creating a custom and more versatile glass shader

Cycles gives us a great versatility and even if creating transparent materials using the Glass BSDF is fast and effective, this is not the only way. In this recipe we will learn how to create a shader setup that will give us a greater control over the look of the material.

Getting ready

Now we need to change our scene a bit to get its final look. We will just need to change the layers we use. Deselect layers 3 and 5 and select layers 2 and 4. So right now we will be working with layers 1, 2 and 4 as shown in the following figure:

This means that our source light will not be a mesh emitter anymore but a sun lamp, as now we are using our custom caustics. We also added some more objects to our scene in order to learn different glass materials.

Right now we want to create a material, which is quite similar to the previous one, but will allow us more control over its look compared to the default glass shader. Now in the scene there is a new glass...