Hi there
I’m trying to improve my Evee and Cycles materials knowledge and I’m currently tryiing to model this toy. The top acrylic cover is causing me problems. If I use the built in glass shader it looks cool but not realistic. How can I construct a more realistic transparent plastic shader or is there a downloaded material I can grab?
This is what I currently have.
thanks in advance
Use the search box built into this site. There are a few nice plastic materials already available here.
You will also need to add scratches.
@Matakani thanks but I can’t find any examples of a clear perspex type plastic material on Blender artists
I might have to RTFM 
The fine manual is not going to be a lot of help here, however much I like it for getting the basic idea on something – it rarely has specific examples, and it didn’t help me with my glass problems.
There is this thread: Acrylic plastic which goes into a lot of fine detail about how to achieve photorealism, which gets complex real fast. But it has some good basic explanations (or links to such).
This?
Or this thread…
…Are the better results from ‘plastic material’ as a search. Lots of good extra info.
I am the one asking for the acrylic in the table (thread shared). Just FYI, I ended up using Luxcore, and it looked nice. Somehow I was not super convinced about the outcome in Cycles and Acrylic.
Maybe there are new explorations that hopefully lead to a better outcome.
Here’s what I use for my CD cases:
As you can see, the material itself is nothing fancy at all. But the trick is to a) add a tiny bit of bevel with the bevel node and b) crank up the glossy bounces to at least 128, to get those white internal reflections.
With 16 bounces and no bevel - while rendering much faster - those stay way too dark:
Obviously the modeling itself is important to add realism as well, so you need to make sure to give the glass proper thickness, and model every nook and cranny, tabs, even mold lines, as all of those add to the way light breaks up inside the glass. Depending on the object, you might also try to give a higher roughness to any edges that might have been cut or sanded down. Or if you’re portraying used or worn off acrylics (like on a retro handheld game), you might want to put a texture in the roughness socket to simulate scratches or rubbed off plastic.
Also, when it’s an acrylic lid of some sort, make sure that - even when closed - it does not intersect with the other half of the case (or those faces are coplanar). There needs to be a tiny gap between the surfaces, otherwise the refractions get messed up.
I don’t know if you have already seen this approach, but it has a similar effect of increasing a lot of the glossy bounces without increasing a lot of the glossy bounces.
You can go from this glass:
EDIT: Oh, now I saw the other topic and see that you already saw this approach, but you used a higher number of transmission bounces and had some darkening in some areas. That’s maybe time to reduce that amount to 8.
First of all thanks for all the help. It’s really appreciated. I’ve posted my results just in case it helps other people.
First image is Laserschwert’s suggestion
The second is Calandro’s.
Fantastic help. thank you again
I’m glad that helped you, but if you want to have some control over the shadows of the glass, since my method is a bit darker in that area, cause it doesn’t use so many glossy bounces, you could also increase a bit the glossy bounces or you can use another mix shader node this way and control the intensity of the shadow with the color of the transparent material.
Here:
