Rice paper?

[wannabeartist]

Hi,

 

Anyone have a good recipe for a rice paper with arch & design / mia_material?

 

I've been trying to make a rice paper lamp for an interior scene and it turns out to be a bit tricky.

 

So far I have tried setting transparency to about 0.5 with translucency weight of 1. For the wrinkles I put a noise map for the refraction color, but the result is not quite the wrinkled papery-look...

 

Is it even a good idea to put a map for the transparency color - Any tips?

 

Thanks!

[hughie]

rather then make a completely true material you could try having the paper material Self Illuminate

[wannabeartist]

Thanks,

 

I guess I could try that, although I would really like to stick to photometrically correct lights in this one. It's just a simple box open from top and the bottom with a bulb inside.

 

For now I just made it without the wrinkles - lighting-wise it's quite ok, but it would sure look better with if the paper was wrinkled.

[CJI]

Probably need to paint a custom wrinkle map. Putting it in the Refraction slot will effect how translucent the object is as they are linked. At least thats how i think it work. You could aslo put it in the translusence colour for a similar kind of effect.

Either way you need to get the wrinkmap right. If not painted try a large cell map, in chips mode and fractal, that might work can add more noise by layering maps? would need to try it.

[Peter M. Gruhn]

For the map, look for free Photoshop brushes on the net. Paper wrinkles and the like are the kind of thing that get put up. I tried "free photoshop brushes wrinkeld paper" and got a couple likely hits. Also try "grunge," it's a less direct route but might turn up some stuff. Also maybe try googling for shoji. There are a number of paper (and paper alternative) products out there; product shots might provide if not awesome use at least good starting ref.

[Justin Hunt]

Also try dropping the wrinkle map into the translucency slot too

 

jhv

[wannabeartist]

Thanks for everyone for your tips!

 

I did some tests last night and it seems that actually a simple (and subtle!) displacement map did the best job. Of course, if you think about it, that's what wrinkled paper really is - it's translucency doesn't really vary, it's just a wrinkled surface.

 

As for the entire object though, one still needs varying translucency or otherwise the metal cage must be modeled.

[CJI]

Would be great to see how it turned out?

[wannabeartist]

Sure thing, I'll post some in couple of days - right now I'm really busy finishing the scene

[RevitGary]

Here is a lamp I did and maps I used.

There is no light in the lamp just some slight illumination on the materials The center one being the brightest. I used uvmap unwrap to apply the maps the the cubes

 

Hope this helps

[wannabeartist]

Thanks for posting, Gary! that looks really nice!

 

My lamp came out slightly less realistic this time, but it should suffice for now.

 

Here's couple of shots - one with 100% (inside) light and other with 60%. There are other lights in the scene as well.

 

After a few more tests I abandoned the idea of using a displacement map and instead modeled the main wrinkles, as they were pretty symmetrical. For the diffuse and the transparency I used a grunge paper texture (thanks for that tip for Peter!). Using a transparency map may not be physically correct, but it gave the best look.

 

I'm pretty happy with the overall look, but not so much with the shadows it produces - they are a bit too sharp to look natural. The ricepaper is blocking the light more than it should and that cannot be solved simply by boosting transparency.

[CJI]

Thats really nice. You could add an MR omni with low intensity and exclude the paper object just to bring out the softness of the translucent shadows? not physically correct mind you but would achieve the effect you are looking for. Could control the shadow distance using the attenuation if needed?

[wannabeartist]

Thanks for the tip!

 

In the mean time I experimented with the light shape and bit surprisingly, it turned out quite nice, when I scaled the light shape larger than the rice paper cover. Here's a shot of the result (There's another unrelated light at the right upper corner).