How to get light through translucent materials?

[moony]

Don’t - you will be lighting your scene with caustics, which is very bad.

You are better off making your ‘translucent’ material emissive instead.

Take a look at this thread.

diffuser test

I just knocked this up - is this the type of effect you are after? [Softbox1] [Softbox2] The first image uses a point lightsource inside the box - with a diffuser made from a squashed cube with a white translucent shader applied. The second image - the shader on the diffuser was changed to be a white emission shader. There is very little to tell them apart. There is a slight falloff towards the edges of the translucent shaded diffuser, whereas the emission one is completely uniform. This …