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Semi Transparent Materials
Heya Dave,
I came across this fantastic technical walk-through channel of how things work and wondered if you know how they make the semi transparent look with the middle completely see-through and a coloured edge to show the form of the objects. And how do you think the smokey air in the pipes is created?
Cheers, Matt
Animagraffs channel here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-Iugo2lqvk -
4 Replies
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Hey Matt,
Great find! Animagraffs has some awesome breakdowns.
For the semi-transparent material with colored edges, they’re likely using a Fresnel effect or a thin-film shader in their material setup. In Redshift (or any other renderer), you can achieve this by:
- Using Fresnel in the Opacity or Transmission – This makes the center fully transparent while keeping the edges visible.
- Adding a Rim Light or Subsurface Scattering – To enhance the glow around the edges.
- Using a Custom Shader – In Redshift, the RS Material with a Transmission color and a Fresnel node in the Opacity slot can help get that look.
For the smokey air inside the pipes, it’s probably:
- An animated texture mapped inside a transparent object.
- A volumetric shader inside the pipes with noise-driven density.
- A post-processing trick using compositing.
You could try Redshift Volume with a noise texture or even an animated VDB if you want full control (Pyro can also give you very realistic looking smoke but you need a lot of RAM and storage).
I think I might add this one to my list of tutorials to make too, a few people have contacted me about this kind of thing.
Hope that helps
Cheers,
Dave-
That’s fantastic! Thanks Dave.
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No worries, did you get it working?
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I haven’t tried yet, but it’s on my to-do list.
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