A few materials I have been working on.
I often aim to use as few nodes as needed this keeps things faster on my computer.
One thing I do is research the material I am trying to recreate, as learning how something is made or formed I find helps a lot and you can use the info else where, and gathering many references from different perspectives.
Him decided to test the glass material on a more detailed cup, one thing i have learned overtime is just because a material looks good on one object doesn’t mean it will work on a different one so i usually try it on many things.
Love to hear what you guys think of it?
I really enjoy lighting scenes.
Love to hear how you guys prefer to light glass and other materials!
In this case I used two spot lights to add some subtle blue light to the scene while using a back and side lights to seperate the glass from the background and key light too highlight a specific area and bring the focus to the cup. I often use 3 point lighting as well.
It’s hard to say without seeing the reference of what it is supposed to be, but it does seem a bit weirdly complex. Like for example, why use Tangent input, what is that for?.. It’s also interesting that you use coat roughness but coat weight seems to be set to 0, or am I just not seeing something there?.. It’s hard to see in the image… I often find that glass materials work quite well even if they are as simple as possible. …unless you want to optimize render times or something like that. …or if you have some really fancy glass objects, those exist, but usually glass is just simple glass…
Ah yeah I create my materials from scratch in most cases still learning and experimenting.
Thanks for the advice I can definitely simplify the material in this case it’s more so built to be a pretty glass material the coat weight just allows you to adjust the tint.
(The coat also lets you add smears to the glass in this case outside of tinting it)
You seem to input stuff for Coat normal as well as roughness, but if you have Coat Weight set to 0, then that does nothing, since there is no Coat with 0.
As for adjusting tint… There are various kinds of glass and also various kinds of things made of glass and some might have coating even though that’s a bit unusual, but sure there might be coating. The coating may have tint. So in that case, you would adjust coat tint, but it’s more common tint might be coming from the glass itself:
It would not make much sense to adjust coat tint to make glasses like that. Sometimes the color also comes only from volume absolution. That’s what we usually see on the edges of glass:
Coat could work for some types of smears, because that’s what they are - another layer of another material on top of glass, but it might be more practical just to mix some other shader on top of glass using the smear mask since roughness textures might take a long time to render fully and to render smears really well, you might need complicated shaders so just an approximation is really fine for most circumstances in my opinion. It’s just easier…
It seems like those are images of a glass and a sheet of glass. What else should we think about it? It’s unclear to any observer if you succeeded in reaching your goals, because only you know how you wanted it to look like. If you shared reference of the result you were aiming for, then there would probably be something to comment on. If you don’t share reference or nodes those are just some images. Yeah, sure, they look nice. The lighting is nice.
I think fair use applies - we are talking about learning and studying material properties, I don’t think we need to worry about copyright in this context at all.
When you say “procedural glass”, I kind of think about stuff like this:
Those seem like interesting kinds of glass to attempt. I think the one you showed… Well, that’s just glass. Just a simple glass shader. Nothing to make… Well… maybe the texture of imperfections…
What else should we think about it? It’s unclear to any observer if you succeeded in reaching your goals, because only you know how you wanted it to look like. If you shared reference of the result you were aiming for, then there would probably be something to comment on. If you don’t share reference or nodes those are just some images. Yeah, sure, they look nice. The lighting is nice. 
