Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
How it works...
The key of this material is obviously the Light Path node, with its several kinds of output.
In this case, we are interested in two of them:
F
The Ray Length and Is Camera Ray output of the Light Path node are added
together. Ray Length defines the thickness of the mesh, and it's also clamped by
the first Multiply node and the Power node. The Is Camera Ray output gets Cycles
to render only those surface points that are directly hit by light rays emerging from
the Camera. When added to each other, the two types of output produce a stencil
effect, gray-scale values distributed according to the thickness of the mesh.
F
Next, the Backfacing output of the Geometry node is added to take into consideration
the color of the back mesh faces. All of this is multiplied by the second Power node for
the Contrast value and further clamped by the ColorRamp node.
F
At this point, the result is mixed with the Subsurface Scattering_color output by
the Overlay node, and finally connected to the Color input socket of the Translucent
BSDF shader, resulting in the semi-transparent-looking shader of the first image at
the beginning of this recipe.
