Freynirks / Glassify
▷ Hero render · shot through glass Pending a real showcase render — replace with assets/img/hero.webp.

✦ Glassify

Turn any Blender render into a shot seen through glass — and keep one part perfectly clean.

The complete guide: installation, all nine glass patterns, and the full workflow, step by step.

Overview

A glass-distortion effect that lives entirely in the Compositor.

Glassify adds a camera-space glass effect to any render — frosted bands, rain-streaked panels, beveled tiles — built as a one-click compositor node setup, not a material or shader. A real 3D Empty positioned in front of the camera controls exactly where the image stays clean and where it distorts.

  1. 01Installation — enable the addon and open its panel.
  2. 02Nine glass patterns — a different texture for every look.
  3. 03The mask — move an Empty to place and size the clean zone.
  4. 04Fine-tuning — displacement, blur, chromatic aberration, sensor noise.

5.2+

Blender version — built on the unified compositor

9

Built-in glass patterns, picked from one thumbnail grid

EEVEE / Cycles

Any render engine — 100% post-process

01 · Installation

Five steps and the panel's ready.

  1. Download the Glassify .zip file.
  2. In Blender, go to Edit > Preferences > Add-ons.
  3. Click Install from Disk and select the downloaded .zip.
  4. Enable the checkbox next to Glassify in the add-ons list.
  5. Open a 3D Viewport, press N, and look for the Glassify tab.

Keep the downloaded filename intact before installing — a modified filename can make Blender fail silently on install.

▷ Screenshot · Add-ons preferences panel Edit > Preferences > Add-ons, with Glassify enabled.

Interface

One panel, one button to start.

The Glassify panel lives in the 3D Viewport's sidebar (N key). With no effect in the scene yet, it shows a single Add Glassify Effect button — click it and the full compositor setup, plus a mask Empty placed in front of the camera, is built for you in one step.

From there: a large thumbnail grid picks the pattern, with Prev/Next arrows to cycle through all nine. Mask, Displacement, and Blur stay open by default since they're the controls you'll reach for most; Pattern Detail and Sensor Noise stay collapsed until you need them.

▷ Screenshot · Glassify panel The full sidebar panel with the pattern picker, mask, and displacement sections open.

In practice

Nine glass textures. One thumbnail grid.

The same scene, run through all 9 built-in patterns. Pick one from the panel's visual picker and Glassify rebuilds the compositor wiring in a single click — each pattern remembers its own tuning independently.

Glassify Horizontal pattern
// horizontal — continuous frosted bands
Glassify Vertical pattern
// vertical — the same band, turned 90°
Glassify Diagonal pattern
// diagonal — a genuine lean, not just a rotation
Glassify Circular pattern
// circular — ripples radiating outward
Glassify Dots pattern
// dots — a halftone grid of glass circles
Glassify Square pattern
// square — beveled tiles, real glass block
Glassify Blur Direccional pattern
// blur direccional — no lines, just a soft streak
Glassify Hexagonal pattern
// hexagonal — a diffuse honeycomb facet
Glassify Rain pattern
// rain — real photo-based droplets and rivulets

See the full detail and tuned defaults for each pattern in the manual →

The mask

Not a slider — a real object in your scene.

The clean/distorted zone is driven by an actual 3D Empty, projected onto the frame through the active camera. Move it, rotate it, or grab and scale it to resize the effect — because it's a real object, it can be keyframed, so the clean zone can track a moving subject across an animation.

Two shapes are available: Circle, a soft elliptical falloff for a classic vignette look, and Rectangle, a hard-edged box with zero gradient that isolates a zone completely. Each has its own dedicated Empty, so resizing one never disturbs the other.

▷ Screenshot or video · Mask Empty in the viewport Circle vs. Rectangle mask, with the Empty visible in camera view.

Troubleshooting

When something doesn't go as expected.

The mask doesn't seem to do anything — distortion covers the whole frame

Make sure a camera is assigned to the scene — the mask's 3D-to-2D projection requires an active camera to work at all.

I accidentally deleted my mask Empty

The panel shows a warning — assign any Empty object in the Empty field to recover, or use Add Glassify Effect again to rebuild it.

Switching patterns changed values I had tuned on a different preset

This shouldn't happen — every pattern holds fully independent state. See the full manual for details.

Support

Questions? Let's talk.

To report bugs, get help with installation, or just show us what you built, reach out through our support channel.

See the full manual → Support channel ↗