As most of you know, it is no secret that Cycle's default glass shader severely lacking behind in terms of realistic and advanced rendering features. It produces black shadows and dark spots on various places on the glass, it doesn't support dispersion (color separation on refraction), and anyone who has tried using the built in caustics, knows that it's a time consuming, noise-filled and painful process.

Prism, a Fast and Realistic Glass Power-Up for Cycles

That is the reason why I created Prism, to remove these limitations and even discard their existence, to provide easy-to-use controls and full control of these features. As an artist myself, I want focus on the creative process rather than try to battle noise, artifacts and poor results. That's what Prism is for, to remove all the bothersome and tricky parts of the glass shader and only expose the fun parts, while providing a shader that just works, no fuss! Prism is the beefiest update to Cycles glass shader you can find!

Prism adds a whole set of new realistic features to the glass shader, in addition to noise reducing optimizations and speed-ups, it adds dispersion, the breakup of colors when refracted. It adds light absorption, which takes the models thickness into account, letting more light through thinner parts. And one of the key features Is that it also adds caustics. Very fast caustics, which also takes dispersion and absorption into account. All of these features are easily tweak-able and disabled if so is wished.

Features included with Prism:

Dispersion (colors are broken up on refraction)
Light absorption & glass thickness
Super-fast caustics with colors, dispersion & absorption
Quick render times
Plug-n-play, just add it and render, no fuzz
Easy to use, pragmatic and artist oriented controls for:
- Base color & Absorption color
- Index of Refraction (IOR)
- Roughness
- Dispersion Amount
- Caustic Intensity
- Absorption Thickness & Density
On top of this you will also get all the updates and improvements I make to the shader as I use it throughout my own projects, completely free of charge. Also, feel free to request more features or content that I can add to the kit.

The shader is extremely easy to use and Prism provides simple controls, which lets you build virtually any glass-like material, be it diamonds and gems, water bottles, fluids, lenses, ice and so on

. If you have used the regular glass shader before, you already know Prism. Otherwise the documentation will get you up and running in just minutes. . I suggest that you play around with the settings while trying out different light setups and types. I bet you will love the caustics and the creative effects they allow for.

Last updated on 2016-03-21

Release notes v1.1:

Simplified Absorption controls
Added a shadows slider to emulate shadows on the caustic projection
Corrected small errors
Added a documentation .pdf
Branched the shader into alternate versions.