Hi everyone!

With Gara Prime and the Gara Kaleida skin, you may have noticed an updated glass effect that is much more luminous than the original Gara’s glass. We’d like to share the steps on how TennoGen artists can make glass creations that match these more vibrant iterations of Gara, should they wish to.

https://imgur.com/a/oxq8xV8

Despite looking quite different, very little actually changes behind the scenes. Gara Prime’s glass uses the same shader just with three small changes to the PBR texture workflow.

It all comes down to revising your diffuse, roughness, and specular. To achieve the updated glass appearance, please follow the reference images below:

Diffuse gets significantly lighter: https://imgur.com/a/UIceBls

Making the valleys brighter helps the carved areas look cleaner and smoother against the shiny, flatter surfaces.

Specular also gets significantly lighter: https://imgur.com/a/5GazYVg

Specular can literally be filled with pure white.

Roughness on the other hand gets darker: https://imgur.com/a/0ObTr9B

Although roughness gets darker, the valleys will need to be brightened like with diffuse. Because of the contrast, the valley lines are technically only going to be slightly lighter than the originals, it just looks quite stark. As with diffuse, these brighter valleys will cause the carved areas to look cleaner and smoother.

Generally, these edits to diffuse, specular and roughness help the glass respond much better to colour.

Here are some comparisons of the new (left) and original (right) glass set up on Gara:

Pure Red: https://imgur.com/a/oMrO5Np

Pure Black: https://imgur.com/a/8n5IlDn

Pure White: https://imgur.com/a/9dTkjGK

Pure Green: https://imgur.com/a/wzguH7w

This strategy of revising diffuse, roughness and specular values in the material maps was applied not just to Gara Prime but also on the Astilla Prime and Volnus Prime weapons. In other words, you can work these PBR edits into not just your Warframe armor ideas, but onto your weapons ideas as well!

https://imgur.com/a/Azyu2ST

It’s as simple as that! We hope these guidelines on creating luminous glass will help inspire your future creations.