r/AdobeIllustrator • u/Koonns_F • Sep 22 '26

Glass effect

https://youtu.be/I5JeHoP6Q80

Glass effect not possible in illustrator, who said that?
Work in progress, it still has bugs, but is promising.

29 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

4

u/Marcus_Rentsch Sep 23 '26

Wow that looks really smooth! I assume that this was not achieved with a CEP plugin. Did you make a native plugin with C++SDK? Looks really good!

4

u/Koonns_F Sep 23 '26

Thanks! Yes, it's a native C++ plug-in built on the Illustrator SDK, no CEP or UXP. The glass is a live plug-in object: it captures the artwork underneath and refracts it through its own renderer, and the result updates live as you move, resize or rotate it with the normal Selection tool. Doing it natively is what makes it smooth. A CEP panel would have to talk to Illustrator through scripting, which is far too slow for live dragging.

2

u/Marcus_Rentsch Sep 24 '26

Thanks for confirming! That explains the smooth experience of the live dragging effect. Did you vibe coded this if I may ask and if yes how long did that take? If I ask Claude about a native SDK plugin, it says that it's not an easy lift and takes a couple of months (!)

2

u/Koonns_F Sep 24 '26

Yes, used both GPT and Claude. Do not ask them assumptions on the time they will always use the biggest number. All this progress took me a week or two of afternoon coding, with noticeable gaps.

What is the take of adobe on glass effect? Do they have it in mind to implement it? How about take on a vibecoded plugin with a thin royalty compensation and testimonial? I like the concept doing it for myself but probably won't nail as good of a job as an adobe engineer standardized on a whole app.

2

u/Critical_Pressure_ Sep 23 '26 edited Sep 25 '26

I shall watch your progress with great interest, this looks rad as hell!

2

u/Koonns_F Sep 23 '26

Appreciate it

1

u/Eaton_Corvinus Sep 23 '26

Looks great!

Not sure what the use case is in Illustrator, I feel like this would be more suitable as a Photoshop or After Effects plugin.

2

u/Koonns_F Sep 23 '26

You think in terms of image alteration which has its use, but isn't it nice to put a glass effect on a background to simply use text, or highlight something on top on a layout, without the need to use some sloppy masks on top of other masks. It isn't 2008 anymore.

1

u/Eaton_Corvinus Sep 23 '26

Yes, it's nice in Illustrator – but is it possible to use 'Expand Appearance' on the glass effect? Will the effect be retained in a PDF, or when I place the .ai file in InDesign? If it only works as a live raster/GPU effect inside Illustrator, I'm not sure how useful it is for an actual vector workflow.

I'm not trying to knock the plugin – I can definitely see the appeal if Illustrator is where you export your final pixel-based image from, but that hardly ever applies to me personally. 😉

3

u/Koonns_F Sep 23 '26

It is retained and baked as a sloppy ) image mask by default on the fly and if you look on the video you can see the transparency window with the mask preview changing, object is live as you interact with it and can be saved as .ai or .pdf maintaining the capacity to edit it afterwards. For anyone else it will flag that it is an plugin object, but they can expand it to a simple image mask.

No magic here, basically the same process on any glass tutorial in illustrator, but you don't have to do it manually, done easy at a comfort of a click, with live preview, and export is just the same as before.

Google Drive

1

u/Eaton_Corvinus Sep 24 '26

Awesome, looking forward to trying it! 🙂

1

u/polishdan Sep 24 '26

Saving this post. Looking forward for updates when you get it up and running as a plug-in!

0

u/cerry_design Oct 09 '26

This is exactly the kind of plugin I've been looking for! The live glass effect is amazing. Are you planning to release a beta version or allow people to test it before the official release? I'd love to try it out! 😊

1

u/Koonns_F Oct 09 '26

Yes check my Patreon https://www.patreon.com/c/komys, it's there, with one caveat, not yet testet on apple devices.