TennoGen Luminous Glass Effect Guide

[[DE]CoreyOnline]

Hi everyone!

With Gara Prime and the Gara Kaleida skin, you may have noticed an updated glass effect that is much more luminous than the original Gara’s glass. We’d like to share the steps on how TennoGen artists can make glass creations that match these more vibrant iterations of Gara, should they wish to.

Despite looking quite different, very little actually changes behind the scenes. Gara Prime’s glass uses the same shader just with three small changes to the PBR texture workflow.

It all comes down to revising your diffuse, roughness, and specular. To achieve the updated glass appearance, please follow the reference images below:

Diffuse gets significantly lighter:

Making the valleys brighter helps the carved areas look cleaner and smoother against the shiny, flatter surfaces.

Specular also gets significantly lighter:

Specular can literally be filled with pure white.

Roughness on the other hand gets darker:

Although roughness gets darker, the valleys will need to be brightened like with diffuse. Because of the contrast, the valley lines are technically only going to be slightly lighter than the originals, it just looks quite stark. As with diffuse, these brighter valleys will cause the carved areas to look cleaner and smoother.

Generally, t hese edits to diffuse, specular and roughness help the glass respond much better to colour.

Here are some comparisons of the new (left) and original (right) glass set up on Gara:

Pure Red:

Pure Black:

Pure White:

Pure Green:

This strategy of revising diffuse, roughness and specular values in the material maps was applied not just to Gara Prime but also on the Astilla Prime and Volnus Prime weapons. In other words, you can work these PBR edits into not just your Warframe armor ideas, but onto your weapons ideas as well!

It’s as simple as that! We hope these guidelines on creating luminous glass will help inspire your future creations.

[DonGheddo]

ty

[lukinu_u]

This make wonder if there is any plan for the ingame engine tennogen viewer.

It's not that much of an issue for basic materials, but it become very complicated to get an accurate result when it comes to transparent emissives or unique materials like glass.

[EccentricChivalry]

Excuse me will there be a look over for the Catena Prime Ephemera, its really intense that it cover most of the details of the user. Will there be any adjustments on the thickness or glass blur effect

[vanaukas]

Sorry but I need to ask, this means there is a greater range than before on how "transparent" and "glassy" the glass can look, isn't it? It would be possible mix both the old and new effect at the same time or I'm understanding it wrong? I'm askign just by curiosity, I'm starting to dive more in 3d stuff and this thread caught my attention

[chaotea]

Will these updates be applied to existing gara / glass themed items in game? The Hyalus seems to use old glass.

Tennogen items are the Zamariu skin and the Silica Helmet. will these be updated dev side or is it required for the original authors to update it?

[[DE]Taylor]

6 hours ago, chaotea said:

Will these updates be applied to existing gara / glass themed items in game? The Hyalus seems to use old glass.

Tennogen items are the Zamariu skin and the Silica Helmet. will these be updated dev side or is it required for the original authors to update it?

This guide is for artists making new glass creations who want references on how to make the glass more vibrant. There is no expectation for this to apply to existing items. :) 

[kyori]

I think because of the texture n shape of the glass pieces on gara deluxe, they looked more like glass. Those on gara prime or normal gara tend to look more like toy plastic those molded pieces, or even looked like transparent rubber toy pieces.

[(PSN)Crackle2012]

Very cool, thanks for posting this!

[(PSN)Aye_Siwmae69]

Will these updated textures be applied to her powers?

[led2012WF]

On 2021-06-02 at 3:30 AM, [DE]CoreyOnline said:

Hi everyone!

With Gara Prime and the Gara Kaleida skin, you may have noticed an updated glass effect that is much more luminous than the original Gara’s glass. We’d like to share the steps on how TennoGen artists can make glass creations that match these more vibrant iterations of Gara, should they wish to.

Despite looking quite different, very little actually changes behind the scenes. Gara Prime’s glass uses the same shader just with three small changes to the PBR texture workflow.

It all comes down to revising your diffuse, roughness, and specular. To achieve the updated glass appearance, please follow the reference images below:

Diffuse gets significantly lighter:

Making the valleys brighter helps the carved areas look cleaner and smoother against the shiny, flatter surfaces.

Specular also gets significantly lighter:

Specular can literally be filled with pure white.

Roughness on the other hand gets darker:

Although roughness gets darker, the valleys will need to be brightened like with diffuse. Because of the contrast, the valley lines are technically only going to be slightly lighter than the originals, it just looks quite stark. As with diffuse, these brighter valleys will cause the carved areas to look cleaner and smoother.

Generally, t hese edits to diffuse, specular and roughness help the glass respond much better to colour.

Here are some comparisons of the new (left) and original (right) glass set up on Gara:

Pure Red:

Pure Black:

Pure White:

Pure Green:

This strategy of revising diffuse, roughness and specular values in the material maps was applied not just to Gara Prime but also on the Astilla Prime and Volnus Prime weapons. In other words, you can work these PBR edits into not just your Warframe armor ideas, but onto your weapons ideas as well!

It’s as simple as that! We hope these guidelines on creating luminous glass will help inspire your future creations.

No changes on emissives? Before the glass parts have to be completely white on emissives