Hidden Glass Distortion Effect (With Real Time Reflections) - Tutorial

There are a lot of quirks with the Roblox Engine, especially when it comes to playing around with different features. A great example would be playing with FogColor would create a color banding effect, or cell shading which is a bit different from that.

Turns out, there’s some sort of a bug feature that will make the glass act rather. Strangely.

To actually use this effect, do the following:

1. Create a Part, change its material to Glass.
   

   

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2. Insert a Highlight object inside the part, set the OutlineTransparency and FillTransparency to 1
   

   

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3. Then, set the Part’s Transparency to a value bigger than 5.
   

   

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There! Look at that!
And the best part about this? It actually reflects objects!

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It does kinda act strange at certain angles… It makes me have some sort of a sickness. Eugh.

Possible use cases for this could be screen distortion, or faking reflection on surfaces.
It works with meshes as well!

It seems like this is the effect that Roblox uses for Water Reflections, as stated by one of the staff members, it is not a real Screen Space Reflection, rather a trick of some sort.

Credits:
TheCrypticRunner - for actually discovering this.

The type of bugs we need.

It also kinda removes shadows when set to 1.

Hey, I know this bug! I had found it myself while trying to do a different bug. I’m guessing everyone knows about this bug though. Nice job finding it! BTW in hallways the end can seem farther with this, if you keep transparency low.

Very neat little trick, if only i knew of this sooner when started working on my own more official reflection system. Do you think it could be possible for me to perhaps combine the two?

judging by the amount of limitations in the glass material and that you’re using viewport frames here, not quite, unfortunately

Yeah i kinda noticed too, its either my viewport reflections or the glass trick running. And even when they run together, they mix very poorly. (Also along with the fact that my viewport reflections are designed to change transparency and color based on reflectors current transparency and color so yeah)

This looks amazing, I could see some real awesome uses for this! Need more stuff like this.

Still gotta say, under good conditions, it can look pretty good!
Thanks for sharing this trick!

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This may help visualize what is going on here:

https://gyazo.com/e2a4b7cc896cf2727a2bae9955a127bc.mp4

The distortion seems to lower as the transparency reaches 1. But it keeps decreasing distortion below 0, so it seems reversed and gets distorted again.

It’s pretty awesome! Me and my friend Hoofer actually found this bug over 4 months ago, been using it for a tool in our game with a little orb.

Proof: The FUTURE of Oaklands . . . - YouTube

I made a feature request to let us see opaque objects through glass, and SergeantHippyZombie stated that glass without distortion would be nice, and a Roblox Staff told you to not use glass for distortion and hiding opaque objects, People start to use Ice or Metal so they can’t see the rock bottom and not experience the bug

Hope that bug gets patched, Highlights doesn’t work on transparent materials

works very well in very good condition although it is very bugged

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Is there a way to change the reflection direction? It would be pretty cool if so.

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unfortunately not. this is just how it works.

Thanks for the response!, it look very good anyway, i just exaggerated the effect in that picture(transparency 10), but transparency 4 worked the best for me.

I tried it and it doesn’t work

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do you know any way to fix it?

check your graphics settings, lighting technology and rendering api.

oh, doesn’t work if not playing

This is really cool, thank you for sharing this!