Nx Color  ·  User Manual  ·  Version 1.0

Nx LiquidGlass Pro

Real glass for moving pictures. Every other effect in this category blurs what’s behind it. This one bends it — with the same equation a lens designer would use.

REFRACTION · DISPERSION · LIQUID BEHAVIOUR · TRUE 3D CARD

Contents

What’s inside

The Material

Glass That Actually Bends Light

Nx LiquidGlass Pro puts a piece of glass into your shot — a panel, a lens, a drop, a title — and lets the picture pass through it the way light passes through real glass. Under the hood it builds a thickness field (how much glass sits under every pixel) and traces light through it with Snell’s law. That is why a straight line behind the element kinks at the rim, compresses through the curve and carries on, instead of simply going soft.

That one decision is where everything recognisable about the material comes from. The curved edge genuinely converges light, so the rim magnifies and brightens the way a lens does instead of just smearing pixels. The flat interior bends nothing, because flat glass bends nothing. Colour splits at the edge — and only at the edge — because that is the only place the surface bends light at all.

Inside, light travels the full physical chain: refraction through a derived surface normal, wavelength dispersion from a real Abbe number, Beer–Lambert absorption along the actual light path (so a tinted element is nearly clear at its thin rim and saturated through its thick middle), Fresnel reflection that turns mirror-like at grazing angles, and a GGX specular highlight from a light source you position.

And because the material is called liquid glass, the behaviours that make something read as liquid are modelled rather than faked: drops that reach for each other before they touch, surface tension that thickens the neck where two bodies fuse, ripples that bend the light instead of wobbling the outline, and a spring on every entrance.

The Panel at a Glance

The controls are grouped in the order you will usually reach for them. You rarely need more than the first three groups; the rest are there when a shot asks for them.

Every control is described individually in the Control Reference chapter at the back.

Quick Start

Ninety Seconds to Glass

The factory defaults are the hero material — a thick, capsule-cornered lens with real edge refraction. Apply the effect and you already have the look. From there:

The four controls that matter

Requirements & Hosts

Where It Runs

Nx LiquidGlass Pro runs on macOS and Windows, GPU-accelerated through Metal, CUDA, or OpenCL with a multithreaded CPU fallback. It installs as a native effect in:

In every host the effect is named Nx LiquidGlass and lives under the Nx Color group. The same controls appear in the same groups everywhere — only the surrounding chrome changes.

Installing

Adding the Effect

Run the installer for your platform, then add the effect inside your host:

Licensing & Activation

Your License

At a glance

Activating

Building With It

Shapes

Up to four shapes, each with its own type, position, size, rotation, tilt and glass colour. Five primitives cover the vocabulary:

Link Width / Height drives both extents from one Size control — and the lock is applied in pixels, so a linked ellipse is a true circle and a linked polygon is regular on any frame aspect. A Ring reuses Corner Radius as its wall thickness, and Width / Height stay its outer extent.

Any other shape at all: set Shape Source to Source Alpha or Source Luma and the incoming image becomes the silhouette — text, logos, and mattes all work, with full bevels, refraction and lighting. See Liquid Text & Logos below for the per-host wiring.

Liquid Behaviour

Combine decides what multiple shapes are to each other. None keeps every shape an independent pane with its own complete rim — overlaps simply stack. Merge fuses shapes into one liquid body as they come within Merge Distance, exactly the way two drops of water do. Morph cross-fades shape A into shape B (and C into D): animate the Morph slider and one control shape-shifts into another, with a real bevel and real lensing at every in-between.

Three behaviours sell the merge as liquid rather than as overlapping outlines: Merge Tension thickens the glass at the neck of a join, so it lenses harder than its surroundings — the cue that reads as fusing. Cohesion makes nearby shapes lean toward each other before they touch, strongest just before contact. Gravity Sag settles the body downhill — the thick part of the lens migrates the way gravity points, which is what stops a blob looking like a floating sphere.

With a single shape enabled, all three Combine modes render identically — nothing changes until you ask for it.

The Glass Body

Two numbers define the body: Bevel Width (how far the curved edge reaches inward) and Depth (how tall the glass is). The Surface Profile popup sets the cross-section of that curve — Convex Squircle is the default and the only profile that lands on the flat top with both zero slope and zero curvature; Chamfer and Lip are deliberately harder, faceted looks.

The geometry protects itself: a bevel wider than the shape can hold is automatically reduced to fit, a surface can never bulge higher than the curve carrying it, and a bevel wider than the corner radius no longer facets the corners — the corner ridge is rounded off to carry it. Over-drive the sliders on a small shape and you get the most glass that shape can physically hold, never a broken render.

Fill Shape (dome) curves the whole surface instead of curving an edge around a flat top. A flat top always has a boundary where the surface stops bending, and the eye reads that boundary as a faint inner outline however smooth it is. A dome has no boundary — it reads as a lens or a drop. This is the one checkbox that turns a UI panel into a water droplet.

Physical Scale scales bevel, depth, shadow and blur together so a preset keeps its proportions at any element size — and Scale With Shape Size derives it from the shape itself, so a larger element automatically reads as thicker material.

The Card in 3D

The element doesn’t have to be a graphic laid on the frame — it can be an object in front of it. Field of View replaces the flat view with a real per-pixel perspective ray. Tilt X / Y put the card on a plane in 3D: a true trapezoid silhouette, correct foreshortening, refraction traced through glass that is genuinely at an angle. Card Thickness gives the slab a side, so a turned card shows its cut edge — the strongest cue that it is solid — and Bottom Roundness curves the underside from a flat-cut panel into a pebble.

Height Above Backdrop floats the glass off the image. The exit ray travels through air before it lands, so the magnification grows and the element gains real parallax — and the drop shadow responds: crisp where the glass nearly touches the plate, soft and light where it lifts away. On a tilted card that varies along the element, one end sharper than the other, exactly as a real shadow does.

Face-on with no perspective, the whole 3D layer is bypassed — not approximated — so the common case costs nothing. Per-shape Tilt puts each shape on a card of its own (Combine = None only: merged shapes must share one space to blend in). A deep card under wide FOV shows its back face smaller — that taper is correct perspective; lower the Field of View to straighten the sides.

Light, Reflection & the Rim

One key light, positioned by Light Angle and Light Elevation, drives the GGX specular highlight, the edge highlight and the press glow together. Highlight Softness runs it from a tight glassy glint to a broad sheen; Highlight Streak stretches it along the outline the way a curved edge does; Fill Light adds a weaker lobe from the opposite side and Rim Wrap carries the light around the silhouette.

The bright silhouette is not a painted stroke — it is Fresnel: the surface turning mirror-like at grazing angles, which at the edge of the element it always is. If your edge looks dead, this is the control. What the surface reflects comes from Reflection Source: Backdrop mirrors the shot itself, which keeps the element grounded in the scene; Studio switches to a built-in three-source rig — sky, ground and a key softbox that sits exactly where your Light direction says — so there is always something to reflect even over a flat plate.

The Edge & Outline group finishes the rim: a thin bright line on the lit side, an inner shadow on the unlit side, subtle bevel occlusion — the difference between a real bevel and a painted gradient — and an optional crisp outline stroke.

And then there is Light Sweep, which might be the single most useful slider in the plugin for footage. Turn it up and the key light pendulums slowly around its set angle — and because the highlight, the bright rim and the studio reflection all read the same light, they all travel together. On a phone this is what the gyroscope does to glass when your hand isn’t quite still; on a screen it is the difference between an element that was rendered and an element that is there. Try 0.3 with the default speed before you decide it’s too much. It probably isn’t.

Colour & Dispersion

Dispersion is the chromatic aberration of the glass itself: each wavelength bends by a different amount, so the edge splits colour. The Abbe Number is the real optical constant — low numbers are fiery flint and diamond, high numbers are crown glass and water. The flat interior stays perfectly clean by construction, because flat glass cannot fringe; a glass effect that fringes everywhere is showing you a bug, not a lens.

Each shape carries its own Glass Colour, applied as Beer–Lambert absorption over the actual light path: thick parts come out saturated, the thin rim nearly clear, and the tint reads exactly as picked at the Reference Depth. When two tinted shapes merge, their colours mix across the neck weighted exactly as their surfaces blend — colour and geometry can never disagree. White means clear, so a shape opts out of tinting just by staying white.

Vibrancy saturates the backdrop before it enters the lens, and the Legibility system keeps content readable through the element over any plate: a bounded, ratio-preserving brightness push that preserves hue where there is hue to preserve and lifts neutrally where there is not. UI materials want it on (the default); physical objects — droplets, gems, lenses — switch it off in their presets, because a diamond that brightens the wall behind itself reads as a compositing error.

One detail you get for free, because the physics insists on it: a tinted glass dyes its own shadow. The direct light that reaches the shadowed plate went through the glass on the way down, so the shadow of an amber slab runs warm, and the bright patch a lens throws inside its shadow (Cast Onto Backdrop) is dyed the same way. It is the most recognisable signature of coloured glass in the real world — hold a wine glass over a table in the sun — and it happens automatically the moment a Glass Colour isn’t white. Clear glass keeps its plain shadow, untouched.

Motion

Start with the entrance, because everyone needs one. Materialize forms the element by ramping how much light it bends — not by fading opacity — so the material stays believable the whole way in. Add Materialize Bounce and a plain pair of keyframes becomes a damped spring: overshoot, settle, arrive. Materialize Sweep forms it progressively across its own width instead, as a wipe of light-bending.

Then give the entrance a cast. Entrance Stagger is one slider, and it does what an Apple ad does: animate Materialize 0→1 exactly as before, and with Stagger up, Shape A arrives first while B, C and D each follow one step behind — each scaling in with the same Bounce spring, each a real drop with a real bevel from the first frame. With Combine on Merge the late arrivals grow into the early ones and fuse. The value is the fraction of the ramp separating one arrival from the next; 0.4–0.6 with a little Bounce is the sweet spot, and 0 means everyone walks in together.

Ripple is a height wave on the surface: the silhouette stays put and what moves is the refraction, which is what a wave on real glass looks like. Now turn up Caustic Strength while a ripple is running. The wave focuses light exactly the way water in sunlight does, and the surface fills with travelling bright rings — the dancing-pool-floor effect, derived from the same wave, not painted over it. Capillary Dispersion makes short waves outrun long ones so a disturbance fans into a train; animate Ripple Wavefront 0→1 for one tap that runs outward and dies.

The supporting cast: Wobble for slow jelly deformation (integer frequencies, so it loops seamlessly), Breathe for a gentle pulse, Shimmer for a highlight lapping the silhouette. Press is a finger on the material — a gel bulge and glow at a keyframeable, trackable point, with Press Flex pulling the whole body toward the touch. Tick Ripple From Press Point and the tap and its ripple share one control.

Animation Speed is the master clock for everything on this page — including Light Sweep back in the Lighting group. Set it to 0 and the whole material holds its breath.

Recipes

Five Looks Before Lunch

Exact numbers, deliberately. Change them once you disagree with them.

A habit worth stealing: build the look at Draft quality, judge motion at Standard, and only switch to Ultra when you stop scrubbing. Nothing about the look changes — only how clean the blur and the colour split are.

Workflow

Liquid Text & Logos

The glass needs two things: a silhouette (where the glass is) and a backdrop (what it refracts). Set Shape Source to Source Alpha and those are the input’s alpha and RGB. Every stroke of the text then becomes its own rounded glass body, sized by that stroke’s width, so thin and heavy letters read correctly next to each other and the surface holds still as the title moves. Start from Clear Glass or Frosted Glass (the title recipe in The Presets) and shape the letters with three controls: Depth is the height of the flat face, so strokes thinner than twice it stay fully rounded while wider ones become extruded glass with rounded sides; Fill Shape removes that face so everything stays a tube; and Height Above Backdrop sets how strongly the letters lens what is behind them, which is where most of the look lives. Per host:

For glass text over transparency — no backdrop to refract — use Output = Glass Only: rim, specular and dispersion still model; there is simply nothing behind the glass to bend.

Reference

The Presets

A preset is a complete material: it writes every optics, lighting-response and motion control — and deliberately leaves your shapes, camera, light direction and render settings alone, so you can switch materials on a finished layout without losing it. The one exception is labelled: Liquid Blobs (Scene Setup) also arranges three shapes to demonstrate merging. The eleven materials, on the same shot:

Any material also works on a title (Shape Source = Source Alpha, see Liquid Text & Logos). Two starting points that read as glass letters rather than as a control panel: begin from Clear Glass or Frosted Glass, switch Adaptive Legibility off, set Backdrop Blur, See-Through Shadow and Inner Shadow to 0, and raise Height Above Backdrop to 50–90 px, because glass letters live on the lensing of what is behind them. The clear look is pictured there.

Render Settings & Output Modes

Input Transfer tells the effect how the incoming image is encoded — everything inside runs in linear light, and getting this wrong over- or under-saturates the glass. The default, Auto (Match Host), resolves it per host (display sRGB in Resolve and Final Cut; Rec.709 gamma 2.4 in Premiere Pro and After Effects). Override only if your project is set up differently, for example a linearized After Effects project.

Quality sets the spectral and blur sample counts — Draft for scrubbing, Ultra for finals. Anti-Aliasing adds edge-band supersampling on top of the always-on analytic coverage; the band is a few percent of the frame, so 2x/4x are cheap.

Output: Normal composites the glass over the plate. Matte Only hands the silhouette to a downstream node as greyscale; Matte in Alpha writes it into the alpha channel; Glass Only outputs the element premultiplied over transparent black — the right hand-off for Fusion Merges and external compositing.

Diagnostic Views

The View Mode popup shows the internal fields the render is built from — useful for understanding a setup, or for sanity-checking a matte source. Leave it on Final Result to render.

Ten views in all: Coverage, Distance Field, Surface Normal, Thickness, Displacement, Bevel Band, Caustic Gain, Blur LOD and Specular Only, plus the Final Result.

Control Reference

Every Parameter

Groups are listed in panel order. Sizes marked in pixels are reference pixels at 1080p and scale with the render resolution. The factory defaults reproduce the hero material exactly.

Tips & Troubleshooting

Getting the Most From It

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