Lab 085 – Background Glass Material Showcase

Using the BlurredBackground material to build a showcase object.

Overview

I was thinking about potential use cases for the BlurredBackground shader graph node that we saw in Lab 084. The obvious uses are UI elements and background for media. Another idea I had was to use this to showcase 3D models.

I selected three models from the Reality Composer Pro content library. Then I created three spheres and placed the models inside. I added a Shader Graph Material with a minimal graph to use the BlurredBackground node. On the material, I turned on front-face culling. Now we can see the models no matter where we are relative to the sphere.

I think these “showcase spheres” could be useful when creating model/asset pickers. They isolate the model from the rest of the scene, but still let users inspect them in detail.

A video with three 3D models slowly spinning inside of inverted frosted glass spheres

Full Lab Code

The work for this lab was done in Reality Composer Pro. Look for the scene called “BackgroundGlassShowcase”