I’m curious if there is a way to make light pass through something like a leaf or flower pedal. I’m working on a nature scene and want to have light passing through some leafs and flower petals. I tried translucency but it didn’t let any light bleed through.
Mix a glass shader with high IOR (I found 1.7-1.8 to work well for a leaf material) with a diffuse shader. Use roughness on the glass shader to determine how much the light diffuses in your material. If you want your material to transmit colored light to nearby objects, I found that it helps to fake it a little bit by mixing in an emission shader too.
Or you can just use a lightpath trick where the camera sees the translucent material, but the light sees it mixed with a simple transparent material, this will allow you to use the transparent shadow trick built into Cycles and get a better transmission effect.
Also, I agree in general about using a glass shader rather than a translucent shader, as the translucent shader acts a lot like a glass shader using a high IOR with the roughness at 1.
Pretty much, only I use the ‘is camera ray’ output, but that seems to work too (the roughness value for the glass node seems a little low though to look fully opaque).
Either way, I also would decide to add control over the mix by feeding the ouput result through a math node set to multiply, so you can also control the visibility of the transparent material to the light.
Where should I add the leaf image node and alpha image node in there?