Is there a way to make 'textured' refractions in Blender?

Question

I have this color glass object, that has like a ribbed texture to it and I was wondering, is there a way to make the refractions you see on the wall also 'ribbed'? I also would want to hear about some general tips on improving reflections, refractions and overall look of a glossy object like that. Should I use textures or the procedural glass is fine? What would be better for overall look of the object and also tips on optimizing its lightning for final animation. Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

Caustics in Cycles

Imperfect refraction comes from imperfect glass.

You can maybe approximate this effect with normals, but I'm getting better results with assigning a texture to the IOR input on the Principled BSDF.

After several (thousand) samples you can see the glass caustics beginning to resolve into ribs.

If you want accuracy there's no shortcut for this in Cycles, but there are render engines based on different algorithms that handle caustics better.