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Semi Transparent Materials

Anonymous1 year agoSolved

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

https://youtu.be/F-Iugo2lqvk

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  • DaveAdmin1 year ago

    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