Translucent material.... How do you make the effect very subtle?

[thomthom]

I've been trying to render an LED. Originally I wanted a clear housing LED with just the light source providing colour. But I'm finding it harder than I expected, so I'm now working with a housing of the same colour as the light.

When the LED is so close to the camera a simple emmisive layer makes it look flat:



So I thought that if I added a slight translucency it'd spread the light from the omni-light inside around the LED housing. But I the translucency effect is always so strong.






This is just with a refraction layer with Fog colour. You can see the anode and cathode inside the housing. What I'd like to do is add a very faint translucency, as some LEDs are; you still see the internals of the housing, but slightly blurred. But nomatter how I try to tweak this the translucency never reveals the inside.
I even tried to set the transparency level of the refraction layer, with no seemly effect at all.

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Translucent material.... How do you make the effect very subtle?

Well...hmmm...currently the translucency model that's currently available is a pile of s***, so I wouldn't really depend on it for "subtlety". Its generally very hard to get what you're looking for with the way it works currently and if you can get it to work its very "sensitive" to changes in context (ie viewing angle may be enough to screw it up). I don't necessarily want to discourage you with it, but it will take a lot of tests with it.

On the other hand, the subtlety that we perceive visually is largely in part for the amazing abilities of our eyes. When we look at a given object there's a process that's referred to as local adaptation, where our eyes can make very small adjustments in sensitivity to try and perceive as much of the information that is coming into our eyes. Ultimately when looking at these bright LED lights, we're able to see more of the details that the raw information would simply because our eyes adapt to what we're seeing and the raw information that V-Ray spits back does not. I guess this puts this into the realm of color mapping since its "reorganizing" the colors across the range that is gathered by V-Ray into only the colors that are reproducible by the devices (monitors, printers) that are made available.