Translucency Question...

[Bolkar]

Hi, I have a material which is all transparent, and it has a blue fog with a small multiplier such as .2 (the tea pot example from Vlado actually)
There I get a transparent blue color when I render, which is same as the vlado example.
But when I try to get a color on the shadows (which I turn translucency on, my object becomes compleately dark, and nothing happens to the shadows...

What is going on?

I am trying to understand the translucency, it has a strange behaviour.

[J_Bug]

Playing with the thickness value will probably take care of it. Try some extreme values up and down.

Also make sure affect shadows is turned on and you are using VRay shadows with transparent shadows checked. In the case of transparent VRay shadows being checked you can't set the shadows density. Probably would be easiest to test with a VRay light till you get the hang of it.

--Jon

[Dusan_Pavlicek]

The most important thing as I see it is to understand the difference between TRANSLUCENCY and TRANSPARENCY. These are two things which are standing separately: transparency refers to materials such as glass or water (refraction, IOR etc.), while translucency is something that is seen with materials such as wax: light scattering inside of an object.
So if you only want to make your shadows colored, you don't need translucency at all, it's enough to turn "Affect shadows" on (and play around with Fog color and Refraction color) - or to use caustics instead of "Affect shadows", to get it physically correct...

[J_Bug]

Good Point Dusan. Now that I reread the post this would be a better solution.

--Jon

[Bolkar]

I got it.

But, I have another question...

Is there a way to change the shadow and object colors independently?
I want to give a little more color to my shadow, but I dont want to change my object color, quiet happy with the object, but not the shadow...

???

Thanks for the answers...

[s7en]

Bolkar, in answer to your question, yes there's a couple of ways to get seperate shadow and object colours.

1) the heavyhanded Color setting under Shadow Parameters of your lights. If you're using Vrayshadow you'll have to make sure Transparent shadows in unchecked in the VrayShadows params rollout for this to work properly. The downside of this approach is it colours the shadows by every object under the light.

2) Check out Raytraced Shadow Transparency Override plugin by Blur. It does pretty much what you ask:
"When using raytraced shadows, this material allows you to map the apparent transparency of the object differently than the default shadow color/density. This gives you a lot more control of shadows than regular materials do by default."
you can find it at http://www.maxplugins.de or download it directly from http://www.blur.com/Tech/zip/rayshadoverride.zip

option 3), I thought I'd be clever and create two versions of the same object, one set to cast shadows only and be invisible to camera, the other visible, but with cast shadows turned off. Thus letting you use indepent materials for the object and the shadow. Unfortunately its the sort of thing that works in the scanline renderer, but doesn't work well with Vray, which has problem with overlapping faces in the two objects which occupy the same space, and the result is lots of missing faces in your object.

Hope one of these is useful to you.

[Bolkar]

Is there a way around for the overlapping face problem?