In this tutorial I will show you 2 ways of making a frosted glass material in 3d max. The first part of the tutorial is focused on obtaining this type of material directly from the render. Although this part is especially written for 3ds max and vray, the same workflow can be applied to any other rendering software.

First method
1) The basic material settings.
Every time I have a glass material in a scene, I start with the following parameters:
a)    diffuse color – pure black
b)    reflection – a falloff map from black to white, set to FRESNEL
c)    refraction – pure white
d)    Index of refraction (“IOR”) 1.4
e)    Refraction “max depth” 7

If you hit a render at this stage you will have a clear glass material, like the one in the following rendering:

2) Controlling the sharpness of the refraction and reflection

As you can see both reflections and refractions are clear. You can now start by blurring the refractions. You control the sharpness by adjusting the glossiness parameter under “Refract”. A value of “1” for the glossiness produces crystal sharp refractions; by decreasing this value the refractions will become more and more blurry.
For this example, I think that a value of “0.95” is enough.

The refractions are now ok, but the reflections are still sharp.
You can adjust this in the same manner as you did for the refractions, by decreasing the glossiness parameter under “Reflect”.

The beauty of using this method is that you can control the reflection glossiness and the refraction glossiness separately; some types of frosted glass materials, although they have very blurry refractions, the reflections are quite sharp.

Here is a test I did with blurry reflections.

3) Controlling the color
If the frosted glass material that you need to obtain has a color tint, you can assign it by changing the “fog color” from white to whatever color you need.

Note: This has quite a high impact, so you need to use very bright and desaturated hues.
Bellow you will see 2 tests I did, with different values for the fog color:

4) Bump mapping
If the material you want to achieve has some bump pattern applied, just apply the desired bump map in the “bump” channel, and you’re done

Second Method
In the second part of the tutorial, we will go through a more versatile method of obtaining a frosted glass material that allows you to quickly change how the material looks, without having to render again.

Stay tuned!

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