Anybody has a good idea or tip in how to make those translucent plastic materials in Cycles?
I find that the translucent shader with thick / solid geometry generates very dark materials and is also incredible noisy.
Have you tried mixing a glass shader in there somewhere (with a high roughness value).
Also, you might need to use a setup that makes limited use of the ‘add shader’ node as well (mixing it with the result of a ‘mix shader’ node in spots), I found that such a combination can really help to resolve energy loss issues when different types of shader nodes are used (especially when you mix in transmissive materials).
I tried the glass shader as well and they are all way to noisy and slow. Fact is this is a complicated material because it is a volume and not and egg shell reflection. So I think as long as you dont want to go high with samples some trickery has to be done here …
But if you need that extra ‘punch’ for a convincing effect, then I think the only way you can really go forward is to include a glass component like seen in this image.
Cycles_FrostedTranslucency.blend (692 KB)
Now this might be a tad less glossy then the reference image, but that should be easily fixed by tweaking the roughness values.
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I’d also opt for glass… With a tad emission to make it brighter and glossy for the sheen.
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Boarh ey Bein hart Alter!
I have to investiagte then why inside my model the glass shader turns so dark. @IkariShinji is you roller sphere a single shell or does it have a thickness?
Single shell. I agree - it looks a bit hollow, though…
I never would have by logic thought about glass and emission duh … this shader works terrific!
It gets less noisy (and less glassy) with a Clamp setting of 2.0…
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Do you use Clamp in Scene > Sampling ?
Just so! If I don’t save the image as EXR I can’t make proper use the additional dynamic range anyway (I think?) and I find clamping really helps with glassy and glossy materials and also with AA.
P. S.: Looks nice on translucent DVD boxes, too…:eyebrowlift:
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I just went through this thread really quickly but you said you were getting black in the middle and that could be caused by you having your light paths set to low.