When the light is off, the glass looks glossy white, although it seems to have some characteristics in the ref that are not exactly glossy. When adding a point light, I want it to show that I am recreating the glass shade of a lamp.
The one with emission inside doesn’t look far from the reference, but the others look like balloons.
I wonder if it’s possible to recreate this material physically accurately, or if people usually fake it by using one material when it is on and a different one when there is no light.
In fact this look like “enlighted” (?) ballons ?? I do so even see some mini “bubble” ??
What tried you already ? Mixing white glass shader with some emmisson shader somehow ?
It looks like it’s just a basic white principled shader with low roughness, and the glowing version is done simply by adding emission to the shader (with some kind of texture mask at the bottom of the bulb). If I’m right, this is a simple but not fully realistic material.
Here is my attempt at a light bulb material. I used high roughness glass (principled with transmission) with a clearcoat on top. It even reacts rather realistically to having a light inside, though you would have to deactivate the shadows on the material if you wanted to use it that way.
The subsurface tab is open, were you planning on using it? Subsurface will react like a mass of solid material, not like a thin walled bulb, so I would not use it here. Anyway, it has a weight of 0, so it’s deactivated.
Does the glowing bulb have a different material from the others? Because what you did should result in clear, transparent glass.
The bubble has some thickness to simulate the glass. The one that is on has a point light inside. I think the emission in the shader alternative did not work as well.
If you are going to put a point light inside a glass bulb, you should use the light path trick to remove the material’s shadows, as Cycles doesn’t do well with glass shadows.
I thought the “shadow” slot off in object info was to replace that hack.
I will try with that setup you are sharing, but if you turn off the shadow slot in the object…should it be the same?
The result is good without the shadows but, at the same time, somehow unrealistic.
It does do the same, but it has a problem: if you have multiple materials on the same object, you will have to split them before using the checkbox or the whole object loses shadows.
If the shadow trick isn’t realistic enough, try plugging a fresnel node in the color slot of the transparent node. This will make the glass objects keep a somewhat realstic silhouette of a shadow, without having to fully render glass.
Or, if you want full realism, you can remove the shadow trick and render with path guiding. At this time, this feature is available only for the cpu and is really slow, but it can actually render light going through glass, especially if you disable clamping in the render settings.
Path guiding has the potential to converge much faster than GPU - but it’s very scene dependent.
Just because you need 2000 samples on GPU with no path guiding - doesn’t necessarily mean you’d need 2000 samples when rendering on CPU with path guiding enabled.
That is a good point; I just left the same amount of samples and thought it was impossible for me in terms of animating that with a day per frame. I am still curious to see how different it will look with path guiding.
Just curious, what’s with the Blackbody stuff? Otherwise looks similar to what I use, except;
I add my Emission at the very end, then any masking if required. If you do it before Glossy is is mixed in, I assume there is some technical reason for it?
I may mix Translucent/Diffuse mix with Refraction if I want to “catch highlights/hotspots” from within (but not in a milky bulb).
