Hi all,
Right now it seems that Beast renders treat glass like other non-transparent objects. Is there a setting or something that I’m doing wrong?
Beast should threat transparent objects as transparent, so you would get a coloured “shadow” instead of a completely black one. Im not too sure if its only compatible with the default transparent shaders now though, or if it should work with more custom glass shaders as well. Maybe Robert can shed a light on this? 
I can say with certainty that if you use the FX glass, the resultant lightmap does not have any colour in it from the glass. Unless I’m missing something.
Please look here for examples.
http://www.arch-aid.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Web-BirdsEye_02-01.jpg
I know the lightmapper docs aren’t complete yet, but come on guys - there’s some useful stuff in there already 
(The 3.0 docs are not on the website yet, but you have a copy on your disk and you can access it via Help->Unity Manual)
The lightmapper looks at shader’s name and properties to figure out what kind of material it is and how should it be mapped to Beast.
So if you’re using some custom shader, make sure it has the word ‘Transparent’ in it’s name (“Transparent Glass” or “MyShaders/Transparent/Glass” or something similar) and that the main texture’s alpha is the one that defines the transparency.
If you want to use Beast’s RGB-based transparency, in the Properties block of your shader define a texture property called ‘_TransparencyLM’ and just assign a texture to it.
If you need a transparent cut-out shader, make sure it has a ‘_Cutoff’ property.
OMG, Robert… please understand that I hold Unity in the highest respect. I’ve worked in Crysis, Unreal UDK and now Unity, and I can only say that whatever the guys at Epic are smoking, it’s really interfering with their sense of reality. Cause what you guys have already done with Beast is amazing.
The mere fact that I can get as far as I have in a week of messing with 3.0.0b4 is nothing short of astounding. You guys deserve every compliment I read in these forums, and anyone who gives you crap is just a spoilt whiner with no sense of perspective.
I’m there with you, Clamps.
What I’ve described is definitely not very artist friendly and we will need some one-click solution there. But hey, as it is now - you need to know ShaderLab/Cg/Surface Shaders to create new materials anyway! ducks
A tool enabling artists make shaders is a tricky business, but I guess we’ve gotten a long way by implementing surface shaders (well, Aras did 
). We’ll see how it’ll work out for the artists once we come up (or the community comes up) with a graph-based shader editing tool.
It’ll still be a tricky business, because complex shaders will require some hand optimization by programmers, but then this can happen after your creative mayhem, not during, which should be a win for both parties
An then there’s also the really complex effects which can only be hand-implemented (because if the shader tool could do it, it would just be Cg dressed up in pretty buttons ).
So all in all: fear not! 3.0 is not the last Unity release, there will be plenty more and they will be coming soon. Also history shows we’re pretty bad at making just the major releases introduce big features, so you can expect cool stuff coming in 3.1 already
artist friendly sounds like a checkbox on materials: transparent shader [yes/no] (that or be handled through a shaderlab / surface shader related thing automagically)
on the other hand: anyone having transparent shaders not named appropriately deserves some punishment for crap naming. mankind learns best from errors as we know
As someone who knows nothing about shaders or coding, all I can say about Glass in Unity is that FX/Glass/Stained BunpDistort has some very odd properties. For example, it doesn’t interact with Beast at all, nor is it visible through other instances of the same shader.
As far as a GUI for artists to make shaders with… I’d pay a couple of hundred dollars for that if I had to. Cause the money saved on hiring coders, and then working through a separate art-code-production pipeline for each fracking shader would be well worth it.
I had the same problem. FX/Glass/Stained BumpDistort was treaded in beast as solid surface so Ive added
_Color (“Main Color”, Color) = (1,1,1,1)
to properties, set alpha in material to 0
also changed name of shader to “FX/Glass/Stained BumpDistort Transparent”
After those 2 changes beast know that this shader is transparent.