I’m having a problem, folks. And I’ll be upfront: I suck at materials, shaders, and lighting. So I’m turning to the pros.
I’ve been making some CD cases for a project (just something fun to do) and I’m real happy with the way everything has turned out except for the way the cases cast shadows. Take a look:
Check out the shadow on the Bosstones case. You can barely see where the shadow for the case above it is supposed to be, but it looks terrible.
The fresnel falloff applied to the transparency of the case material works perfectly for establishing thickness to what you see, but the renderer (MR) is treating those sections uniformly transparent.
Because the case is set to 98% transparency, its shadows come out looking pathetic. Is there any solution to getting beautiful shadows without either treating it opaque (and getting 100% solid shadows) or increasing the material’s transparency?