Specular controls reflectivity, transmission controls how transparent that surface is. Now, in order to do glass, your main controls are going to be under specular and transmission. So I'm going to go ahead and select one of these objects and go into the attribute editor and highlight my glass material. So let's go ahead and set up an IPR so we can see how this all works. Okay, so I've got that material on all of these. So I'm going to shift select all of these, right click, assign existing material glass. And then I also want to assign it to the windows so I'm going to go ahead and select just the windows, not the window frames.

So I'm going to go into the attribute editor, let's select this and let's just call this material glass. Now this will also work with the Maya standard surface material as well. Now, I'm going to use the Arnold Ai standard surface material. Now I need to create a material that I'm going to turn into glass so I'm just going to select this sphere, right click, assign new material. Now I have this scene here and as you can see, I've got some windows and then I also have this sphere here, which we'll use to kind of see some of these effects.

When you work with architecture, you'll often need to do glass and other types of transparent surfaces.

Maya arnold glass