translucence - please advise

#1

I am not sure I am understanding translucence right. So far I am modeled a human intestinal track (for medical). I am now trying to make it look like intestinal track. In order to do this - I need to make them “see through” but not transparent.

Basically I need to be able to see inside them from just looking at them at first glance. If you have ever seen a jelly fish, you know what i mean. I hope I have described that so you understand.

I am thinking this “look” has something to do with the translucence settings in the attribute editor. Am I right or wrong? Please help me achieve this “look”. Thank you - Jah bless.

#2

This may be a tough one for you, at first. Are you rendering in mental ray, or Maya’s software renderer? Either way, it’s going to be a long haul for you to learn how to shade stuff realistically. Or if you’re just looking for an illustrative style, it may be quicker.

If you’re using the Blinn/Phong shaders with Maya’s native software renderer, good luck.

If you’re using mental ray, you should be using the mia_material_x shader in your material and shadow slots. This shader is great, and has translucence entirely separate from the transparency, with a slider to blend between them.

Can you share a test render showing where you’re at currently?

#3

I dont have Maya 2014 on my machine anymore. I uninstalled it so I can install Maya 8.5 - It is the earliest version I have besides 2014. I have to do this in order to have mental ray. If autodesk wasn’t so greedy (like most american companies) as to charge people money for a separate install for mental ray (which belongs in maya anyway), i wouldnt have to do this, but im not about to pay for mental ray in 2014.

If all else fails, i will have to do multiple renders and then do my final creation in photoshop. :arteest:
I actually found a tutorial on how to create a jellyfish and I have gotten closer to my final result…But I think mental ray is an absolute in my situation.

One plus is - I dont have to animate anything! :slight_smile:
Once again, it is too bad autodesk removed mental ray - They should have left it alone, it was natural for maya to include mental ray from ealier versions… Oh well.

#4

you might be able to get by using some sort of transparent xray shader with facing ratio and a ramp and then blur the pass and overlay it in post. Being medical, you have some artistic license to make things look appealing without having to perfectly match realism.

 otherwise if using mental ray, you can try a MIA X material, make it refractive to around 1.42, make it transparent, and change the glossiness of the transparency/refraction to .3-.5ish and pray render times are decent
 
to take it a step further you'll want to probably incorporate a fast skin shader or render it as a separate pass with a heavy backlight - since I think that's mainly what you're after here is backlight scatter.

Another option that you can explore with mental ray is the mib_glossy_refract node with the different materials set to straight red, green, and blue. Set the refraction and other settings to where it looks good and render it out as a straight RGB pass to use in post to control color shifts or blending etc.

 Good luck, it can be tough to get looking right and still have a decent render time with the current state of tech
#5

Mental ray in Maya 8.5 works perfectly. I will just stick with this version for now. Hopefully autodesk will someday realize to put mental ray back into maya where it belongs. Maya is supposed to be a packaged deal…I wonder why they feel they need to sell mental ray as an extra - that doesn’t seem like a nice gesture on their part, being a multi-million (if not billion) dollar company…

Anyway, thanks for the posts.

#6

At least in the US/EU, Mental Ray 3.11 is included with 2014. It’s a separate install, but a license comes in the box. You just need to make sure its enabled in the installer. Is this not the case with your copy?

#7

I dont have maya 2014, I have maya 2013 and maya 8.5 - I dont mind 8.5. It works well for what I need, even better than 2013, because 8.5 has mental ray. I know in a prev post I said I dont have maya 2014 anymore, but I meant to say 2013. My error. Nevertheless, Im not sore, just a little “put out” by autodesk making mental ray separate from maya - oh well. :shrug:

#8

Mental Ray has come with 2013, 2012 and a fair bit before that too as well, has it not?

#9

Mental Ray hasn’t gone anywhere. The licensing hasn’t changed, nor has the pricing. It still comes with Maya to this day. I don’t see what makes you think it’s any different.
The only thing that has changed is the fact that Mental Ray has now been liberated from the main Maya code base. It is now a plugin instead of being hardcoded into Maya. Autodesk had to do this in order to improve MentalRayForMaya. In other words… you buy any version of Maya, including 2013, 2014 or 2015, you get a Mental Ray license with it.

#10

Yes indeed, it doesn’t make any sense to drop 2013 (although 2012 is more solid, generally) to revert more than 8 years back to Maya 8. If you don’t see mental ray in 2013, you simply don’t have the plugin enabled.

mental ray has progressed so much since Maya 8.5 that it’s really strange you would prefer to use such an ancient relic! I don’t even think they had the mia_material_x back then?