As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to make nice looking transparent meshes (particularly concave meshes such as cups) without distortion.
The glass material is useful for this because it occludes itself, even on the lowest graphics setting. With any other transparent material, a single cup mesh looks strange because it doesn’t know which faces to render first. Notice how the plastic cup in the picture has lines on it, presumably due to sorting issues.
Both of these cups use the same mesh with 0.5 transparency, but glass looks far better (in my opinion) due to its self occlusion. However, the distortion effect of the glass material is tied with its transparency. This is undesirable because the distortion looks excessive on small objects and obscures their contents.
I am working on a drink system that allows players to mix fruits and make smoothies, and the glass material (without making it almost invisible) makes it too difficult to see what’s inside the blender. I could just suck it up and not use glass, but this seems like it could be easily resolved with an additional property.
I propose that the distortion effect of glass be controlled by a property separate from transparency. Just a simple 0-1 range that controls the distortion’s intensity would make glass a more versatile material.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I would be able to take advantage of the glass material’s self occlusion without excessive distortion. Thanks