I am looking for a material for a white flower petal. I have searched the forums but couldn’t find anything. The material should ne white and slightly see-through and sort of soft looking. Maybe SSS would look good? Any replies are appreciated.
Hey,
Im trying to give a flower a go as well, though I havent gotton to the material stage. I know how to do the basic outline of the petal, and my idea is to use armatures to bend the petal out, as well as to curve it a bit. The problem I am having with that though is that instead od getting a smooth bend, I find that it waves backwards and fowards. Using armatures should allow me to be able to animate the flower opening. Any ideas???
Thanks,
Michael
BTW, for the petal, I was going to try getting an actual flower, then flattening a petal, make it the same shape in blender, then uv map the pic I took, to the petal (using photoshop to manipulate it, as well as produce an alpha map etc). Not sure that u wanted to go to that much effort though 
I did the image below using uv-mapping. For see through you simply map a texture to alpha.
Here are couple images you can use for your uv-maps if you want. The first one has light showing through and is for the alpha map, and the last 2 are fronts and backs. If you can’t get them to match up easily in your paint program, you might want to just get all the maps from the same image.
Click the image for larger sizes:
Click the image for larger sizes:
MicWit: I tried the armature thing as well and got ugly results too. I ended up using a 2 deminsional lattice for deformation. Actually I used alot of them. For instance you can have one lattice which just has a forward curl on the left side and then apply that deformation and then go to a different lattice which mabe makes the whole leaf bend a certain way, etc…
If I had to do it again. I probably would just use o-mode in edit mode to do the deformations a petal at a time. I think it would be faster then armatures or lattice deformation. Pulling vertices in o-mode is what I used for these leaves here:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=48589
Also. These leaves were not even modeled. They are simply subdivided planes with alpha maps which define the leaf edges and raytransp… I skipped the step you are working on 
A problem I encounter with raytransp however is that it only has a depth of 10 layers (others have told me that it doesn’t but they must be able to do magic). So, you can’t have more the 10 peddles meshes overlapping in the image.
Or, to make things really simple you could map an image similar to this one to your mesh, before any other textures are applied, and hit the noise button in edit mode to have it displace your mesh for you.
click image to go to larger versions:
Sorry for long posts guys.
What i did for a petal is I used an aplha map. 
Its not the best example because you can still see the plane. I fixed it later. My alpha map wasnt entirly black. You can see that i was able to make it more see through in other parts and opaque(spelling?) In other parts. Alpha mapes can be very usefull. And in my opinion easier than alpha mapping. If you need help with anything just ask.
Strongbad said:
Alpha mapes can be very usefull. And in my opinion easier than alpha mapping
Can you clarify the difference between these methods?
Oops, spelling error/brian fart. What i meant to say was, Alpha mapping is easier to do than UV texturing. I have no idea why i said mapes. :-?
Sometimes i dont realize what i am typing.
Sorry if i caused confusion.
They are both mapping, doesn’t matter what you are trying to map to (alpha, nor, color, …). You can uv-map an alpha texture just as you can use orco mapping (what I think you are refering to) or any other method of mapping for that matter.