Help needed creating shader for translucent plastic.

[TinSpider]

Hello

 

First post, so please be gentle.

 

I'm trying to create a texture/shader in MAX 9/Mental Ray of the translucent plastic you would find covering a strip light luminaire. The plastic has to be semi transparent, but also has to heavily blur the objects behind (self iluminating standard texture on a cylinder, or if you prefer 'bulb'

 

I've attached a photo of the kind of look I'm heading for.

 

I've tried using the frosted glass Arch shader with Mental Ray but that didn't look quite right and multiplied my render speeds.

 

Is there any tutorials on how to achieve this??

 

Many thanks in advance.

[Jefferson Grigsby]

is this you feature piece, or just an element to the rendering? Personally, I would use texture maps to approximate this if it were a repeated fixture on the ceiling and not the focus of the shot, but then again I use texture maps for just about everything these days.

 

Not sure about Mental Ray, but Vray 1.5 has a Fast 2 sided material that would do this nicely, although it would have to be backlit by an actual light and not self-illuminated geometry. Expect longer render times whenever ever you do a "brute force" approach to translucency.

[TinSpider]

Unfortunately this is a feature Piece. For the render of the full room I just used textures - just like you would yourself.

 

The animation is for a lighting company, so they want a realistic close up of the product.

 

I may try and 'fake' it with a number of texture planes at different angles.

 

If anybody else has a solution though I welcome it with open arms and a biscuit!