The Best Way To Model Translucent Objects?
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I've been looking through some tutorials and videos and did a quick search through here (topic title, "glass"), and I can't seem to find a good "Yay/Nay" answer to something that's been bothering me for a while now.
What's the best method to creating an object that is translucent so that it's rendered realistically?
Some model examples,
A Body of Water - Say you have a model of a pool, and you want the rendering to look "right", i.e. show proper light refraction and so on (assuming that the renderer takes care of such things). My gut tells me that I can either create a solid block and apply half of the translucency percentage to opposite sides (so if the water was clear it might be 5% on top and 5% on the bottom to see the pool tiles, with a given that the water is 10% translucent), OR I can create a simple one-sided surface at the top of the water's depth and give it the 10% translucency (although this doesn't seem like it would correctly show refraction of light through the depth of the water).
A Glass Pane - Now my gut tells me that windows should never be just a single surface, so if I was to take transparency, thickness, and colour data from a source (say GJames for example as they're a major supplier in Australia), should I split the transparency of say 20% between the two clear faces I want to look through, so one is 10% and the other is 10%?
A Drinking Glass - I guess I would treat this the same as a glass pane, i.e. each side of the glass is a single pane, so a material of 20% translucency would be split on each side between the inside of the glass wall and the outside (but not split across the entire width of the glass because of the air gap).
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Are you asking about how to get these things (glass and water, for example) to look right in a SketchUp image? Or are you going to use a rendering plugin like Kerkythea, Vray, Maxwell, etc? Those are very, very different questions.
If it is just a SketchUp image, then to I don't think there is a point in asking for it to look "right", just how to make it look good. And good is subjective. So for a SketchUp image, I say use a single surface for water or a pane of glass and just adjust the transparency (different than translucency) until you like how it looks. The SketchUp image is, afterall, a conceptual representation, not intended to be realistic.
If you are going to use a rendering plugin, then you'll need to go looking in the appropriate forum, either here or one specific to the rendering plugin.
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