Shoji (paper) Doors

[jujubee]

I'm trying to create Japanese sliding doors with a translucent paper. The light filtering through these doors has to illuminate the interior of a room. I'm not havin gany luck. Has anyone come up with any good material settings?

[timmatron]

Couldn't you just fake it by placing a vray light in front of the door to simulate light coming through? It seem like it would be tough & create long render times to do that physically accurately, so it would be a lot easier to fake it & still get good results.

You could still use translucency if you need to, or you could just map it to resemble it. Just give it a little help with the vray light though!

[Trapezium]

Try a rice paper material for diffuse @ 100%, same map in refract @ 75% and a fog color of 255, 255, 254 with an amount of 0.001 and Affect shadows. Set Reflect/ Refract glossiness to something that looks good for the scene ( I used 0.15, 0.85 ) and a custom Prp/ Prll Falloff in the Reflection with an upwards bow. Oh, and IOR of 1.0 too

This was created quite a few versions ago. Not sure if it still looks the same with fog but worth a try.

If the shot is only indoors you could also use the output of the map to generate light inside.

--Jon

[jujubee]

Vraylights did cross my mind at first for a simple solution (and short render times.) Trapezium is right however - I'm looking for the effects of diffusion hitting paper. I'm going to give it a try.

[jujubee]

Well, the paper is looking good so far - you've gotta take the values down from 255 to 254 still otherwise you're going to get red spots.

It's still not letting light through the paper to illuminate my interior. Pardon my ignorance, but what did you mean by "you could also use the output of the map to generate light inside"?

[percydaman]

when you take a material and give it an outmap map, if you have GI enabled, it will generate light.

[jujubee]

ah- I take it you're referring to the falloff map parameters in the reflection slot? I just didnt see a place to stick an 'output map.'

[Trapezium]

Since we're dealing with diffuse light it would be the diffuse slot. Look at the bottom of the bitmap (I'm assuming) you'r using for the texture.

--Jon

[jujubee]

Ah - not thinking right. I'm not using a texture just a plain white mat. Thanks btw, it's looking good. Will post to the gallery hopefully soon.

[Trapezium]

Cool, can't wait to see how you do it.

--Jon