Crystal Glass

Looks at the picture through cut glass: a grid of facets that each bend it a little. The facets shimmer over time. Marked Experimental: start with low values.

Group: Lens & Distort · How to add an effect

Use it for: a view through a glass block or a shop window · a fractured memory · a stylised transition (animate Refraction from 0).

• Facets – how many facets run across the frame, the same number in both directions.
• Refraction – how far each facet bends the picture.
• Shimmer Speed – how fast the facets shimmer; 0 holds them still.

Tip: keep Refraction low (up to about 0.3) and use more Facets for clean glass; strong bending doubles edges into ghosts.

Experimental: facets are squares of the frame, so they stretch with its shape and have hard seams, and strong Refraction doubles edges into ghost copies.

Control	Range	Default
Pattern
Facets	4 to 80	14
Style
Refraction	0 to 1	0.3
Motion
Shimmer Speed	0 to 5	1

Crystal Glass is one look of the pattern engine: its card has a Style menu that switches to other looks with the same controls, such as Glitch Grid (Styles and presets). Its own graph gives every facet a random tilt and moves the read position inside the facet along it, by Refraction × the Value 0.08, plus a small shimmer of 0.003.

Remix: for bending beyond the slider, select the Value of 0.08 and set it to 0.16.

• Units. Facets is the number of facets across each axis of the frame (at least 4, so a 16:9 frame has wide facets). At Refraction 1 a read moves by at most about 5.7 % of the frame (at a facet corner); the shimmer adds up to 0.3 %.
• Time. The shimmer follows timeline time, so the preview, scrubbing and the export match.
• Experimental. The effect list adds “(Experimental)”; the inspector and agent tool results give the reason above. Values below a control’s floor are reported, not silently raised.

Implementation note (shared with Wave Lines and Glass Dispersion): Effect system: Wave Lines. Nodes: Node Catalog.