I thought I was done with primitives in Blender and glass rendering experiments, but no such luck. Tim Cook brought glass back into fashion just six months after I had decided I’d had enough of those heavy, pretty renders. Hate it or love it, opinions are split. Even I, a minimalism fan who also loves all kinds of optical illusions and abstractions, feel differently about specific examples of Apple’s liquid glass. Some people remember Windows Vista, but to be fair, the current take is far more realistic. And it’s important to understand the main quirk of “glass” in general: it depends on composition and lighting, and in an interface, on whatever sits in the background. That’s why liquid glass so often looks, well, illiquid.
With still images it’s easier: you can pick the right balance of reflections, shadows, refraction and composition as a whole. Most of the time that balance has little to do with the physical accuracy of the render, but that’s a well-known fact.
At the end of the year I decided to count the downloads from my Figma Community page, where I’ve been sharing free resources as public work. 82k downloads in total. Not bad, even for free files. By the way, I’d long planned to publish useful paid resources too, but Figma abruptly stopped accepting new creators (probably because of all the junk in the Community and its own new sections).
Well then, let’s try it with glass. The original plan was an infinite set in two senses: 1) endless customization of the component + 2) constant updates (without rendering primitives I go into withdrawal). The Blender plus Figma combo came with some limits related to unmatted vs. premultiplied alpha. Skipping the boring details: I had to accept a minimal compromise for the sake of huge component flexibility.
The main principle: versatility. The object looks good on light, dark (white/black), colored and complex backgrounds without any extra tricks with blending modes. + transparency and semi-transparent transitions are preserved.
To make the components easy to use in Figma, I built a structure: 3 main sections (the biggest one being Primitives, plus Backgrounds/compositions and Icons-fonts). 15 base categories to start with, 10 object variations in each. 2 shapes (solid and hollow) and anywhere from 3 to infinitely many colors. Base shader: clear glass with a dispersion effect, transparency falloff, versatility. The custom gradient uses a mask made from “itself” to keep the transparent transitions. All of it is packed into components with controls for every parameter. Pretty handy.
Today, when all sorts of nano bananas generate photorealistic renders in seconds, I had to focus on consistent shapes and not get too carried away with abstractions. Although I did check: reproducing even a primitive shape exactly, without artifacts, is a job for very advanced vibe designers. All in all, thanks to the efforts of the CPU and GPU, I ended up with AI-free material of pretty decent quality and consistent shapes.
Presentation
The only thing: publishing dragged on, so I decided not to wait. I also put together a landing page, taking advantage of Figma Sites’ generosity (while the product is in beta, Figma lets you host a site for free, even on a custom domain). If you’re doing it, do it properly, I thought, and changed the name from the working Liquid Glass to Infinite Glass (a nod to endless updates as a creative way of fighting my OCD).
And just like that, infiniteglass.pro is ready. Figma sites, by the way, get indexed very poorly (or not at all), everything is stiff, with loads of auto layout bugs. But it is what it is. I released everything right after New Year, even though it’s the quietest time of the year.
As expected, just a handful of downloads (even of the lite free version of the resources). I backed it up with a reel and dropped a few posts on social media. All in all, this is my first go at paid resources in Figma. We’ll see…
Design — Nashekrashe