Reply To: See through fused (stained) glass layers
Well Dusty, I do not have any good news for you, unfortunately. Glass is difficult (one of the most difficult things in computer graphics!), light itself is difficult. CG is an approximation of something difficult, which in itself is difficult.
If you are talking about ‘flat’ glass, like window panes or stained glass windows, thing are just complicated, but still manageable.
You might, naively, think. ‘glass is see-through, light passes through it.’ Something like this:
But things are more complex, because part of the light gets reflected from the surface and the rest of the light gets bend and then at the other end of the glass the same thing happens: part of the light gets reflected and the rest gets bend (in the opposite direction this time), something like this:
But things are more complicated than this, because light of different wavelengths (read: colors) bend at different angles…
And the thickness of the glass influences how much of the light gets reflected from the surface! (If this doesn’t blow your mind you didn’t understand it..) And that amount is also different for different colors! (Think of an oil film on water..)
Now think of what happens when you’ve got a glass monkey…………
If you want to do shapes, made out of glass, you should look into LuxCore (It’s free and open source and you can use that in Blender with an addon), which handles glass and caustics a lot better than Cycles.
Not actually tutorials, but I recommend watching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv2wqwsvx-8&list=PLa1F2ddGya_8Wzpajwu1EtiS8E1Exm82S&index=51&t=0s