Translucency and raytrace bounces?

Mistara

i'm assuming it's separate study than poser translucency?

does translucency only work in the direction of the normals?

once raytrace light (photon?) comes through and bounces off the floor,
rt bounces = 4, will it rebound off the translucent surface of the prop or will it keep on going?

Thanks. :)

if there is no ceiling, is there a 'universe' heliopause to bounce a rt, or does it go to infinity and die?

Richard Haseltine

Ray trace bounces isn't a form of caustics - it measures how many reflection or refraction steps a ray will take before quitting and taking the current colour. So if you have five refractive glass planes and the bounce is set to 4 when 3Delight calculates what colour it should give a pixel, if it hits the first plane, then traces on and hits the second plane and so on after four it wills top and return the glass diffuse colour, while if it runs out of planes before it runs out of bounces it will return the colour of whatever is behind the planes. In the images, I have set Ray trace depth to 1 and added two refractive planes - you can see the sphere where the view has to go through only one plane (one bounce) but not where it has to go through two.

Translucence applies the colour of the back of the surface to the front colour, so it light is falling on the back surface the final colour will be lighter than if not.

Mistara

brain scr'ch

this is my old poser7 render was wanting to try in DS.
i put a point light inside the lamp shade and set translucence to 1 on the lamp shade,
and one low set ibl light 25%.

i guess it comes down to strategy. :) my goal was soft lighting without losing the stained glass deep colors

Richard Haseltine

You can use a shader with translucency on the lamp shade (and use an inverted version of the diffuse map as an opacity map, perhaps, to get coloured shadows). If you want soft shadows then you can either set the shadow softness in the light or, if you want the light to wrap softly around the items in the scene, you can use a sphere with the uberArea light shader applied - though I've found it necessary to up the quality settings a lot to avoid speckles if uberArea is the main light source.