A walk in the park

[Hannes]

The result of my attempts to get the shader of my recently found fly object's wings right.
I used three versions of three populations of flies (Two pops from above with different seeds and one frontal one). First the flies with the wings' shaders opacity set to zero, the second pop with every shaders' opacity set to zero except the wings, but with "cast shadows" unchecked, and the third pop, which is almost the same like the second one, but with "cast shadows" on, and "invisible" plus opacity set to 0.6 to get less opaque shadows of the wings.
The poor guy, which I have used a lot of times, is from Ten24, and although his facial expression is quite special, I always find scenes where I think he fits in.

[luvsmuzik]

Another reason I like snow. Way too realistic!

[masonspappy]

 So does this mean that something along the lines of "Lord of the flies" is in the offing?

[Kadri]

Nice.

[bobbystahr]

A bit of a night mare but really well done.

[Hannes]

Thanks guys. Sometimes it's hard to struggle with simple things like a fly's wing's shader. It took me half a day to find out, that I had to uncheck "visible to other rays", otherwise the transparent wings looked dark grey from certain angles, and I have no idea why. As long as it works...

[Dune]

Terrific, terrifying, terribly nice. You always have something else/nasty up your sleeve, I love it.

So, did you not separate the wings from the object? That would have been another option. And use a glass shader and some opacity for the veins? Merge a glass shader with a default also works to decrease shadows and get some semi transparency with lighter shadows. I used that method to get semi-transparent tarpaulins (like canvas) on an Italian job.

[Hannes]

Terrific, terrifying, terribly nice. You always have something else/nasty up your sleeve, I love it.

So, did you not separate the wings from the object? That would have been another option. And use a glass shader and some opacity for the veins? Merge a glass shader with a default also works to decrease shadows and get some semi transparency with lighter shadows. I used that method to get semi-transparent tarpaulins (like canvas) on an Italian job.

Separating the wings would have been the next option, but there aren't too much shaders, so copying the pop and making only the appropriate things visible wasn't too much hassle.
I used a glass shader, but it wasn't merging, so I'll have to try that. However copying the pop again and using it for shadows was quite fast.

[Dune]

Yes, I can imagine that. With the opacity you can go as low as 0.50001, very handy for the time being.

[Hannes]

I gave it a try. It works somehow, but either the wing itself or its shadow is inverted.
I tried all combinations inside the merge shader, but no success so far...

[cyphyr]

Urgh!! Horrible, original and detailed work!!

[Hannes]

Thanks Richard!!

This is what I'm after (see below). It's a Photoshop mix of both ways to connect to the merge shader. Weird!!

[Dune]

The latter looks almost like it should, but still a heavy shadow. I can have a look if you want, just need the fly....

[DocCharly65]

Scary nice! 

And the shadow experiments are quite interesting, too!

[ADE]

render? I thought this was a photo, well bloody done!!!!!!