Milky glass for chines palace lantern

Hi
I’ve just finished my model of a chinese palace lantern. I’ve done a quick render in cycles, and this is what it looks like.


My question is: How can I make a material for the “windows” in the lantern that will match those on the picture below? I was planning to have an emitter object inside the model, that would shine through in the same way as it does in the picture. Is this possible, if so, how?


Thanks in advance!

Tried to use a translucent material for the “windows”. I am not completely satisfied by the result, but I’m getting there. Does anyone have any input as to how I can improve the material?


In my opinion the translucent material picks up the light and sends it out to easily. It is as if the entire surface lights up, instead of smaller areas, as in the picture. If I could somehow deal with this problem, I’d might get closer to a satisfying result.

Here’s a few setups to try out. Translucent or SSS will always give that “all over” lighting since they don’t have a true specular transmission component, you need to use the glass shader for that. Glass+SSS is the closest physically to the actual material, but it’s also the slowest and has the most settings to mess with.

plastic_lamp.blend (204 KB)


If you want to lower the amount of scatter caused by the translucent shader - perhaps mix it with a transparent shader.

I’d avoid mixing with glass for your application - it will slow things down appreciably - and probably won’t make the scene look any more ‘accurate’ since you dont have much that needs refraction.

Thanks for the input guys. I am probably going to experiment further with this, but I’ll mark the post as solved for now.

Thanks alot!

can u show us the results
might be interesting as reference

thanks
happy cycles

In this scene I chose to use only one lightsource, which I placed in the middle, which would be where its supposed to be. In the previous render I placed a lighsource close to every “window” in order to make the differences in luminosity more visible.

The render with only one emitter, and the glass pluss sss mix looks like this, only applied to the front “window”. I still think the material emits light with the same luminosity all over the material…


This time I used forsted glass only, and it looks much better in my opinion. Only downside is, as already mentioned, the unwanted scatter. I rendered this image with 1000 samples, but I see I need more for a final render
Thanks for all the help!


I know you marked this as solved, but I offer a suggestion. The mix for cycles glass in regards to lighting can be a little odd in regards for it to work right. I find the glass absorbs light even in a mix. However I found an odd property where it’s possible to “overdrive” the color input for a transparent or translucent node mixed with glass. Using a color-brightness/contrast node applied to the image in the transparent node should be able to do that. You set brightness higher so it goes greater than 1. When you overdrive the transparent/translucent channel, it gives the light going through the lamp a boost. It takes some adjustment to get right. So not only does the lamp itself glow, but it’s still quite possible to light the scene with it.

Keep in mind that apparently amplifies the light in the way that Cycles calculates it, so be prepared to make some adjustments if dealing with multiple light sources. It can get weird if set too strong.

Only downside is it makes for very noisy light. (Which happens with transparent/translucent materials anyways.) It takes a lot of samples to get it looking good.