Been testing out translucence with hdri. The model used was from stanfords high-res 3D scanning repository and converted into .obj using blender. The materials is a simple glass with zero specularity slider value, and the specualr halo set around R 160 G 160 B 160. I am using the uffizi probe from debevec to serve as the hdri. THis render is on premium, 64 RPP, blurry reflections and blurry transmissions enabled. A very realistic transluscent effect is aparrent: And here is the same exact scene on default settings: The top image took five hours to render, the bottom one took 12 minutes. Oh well, it's the price you pay for stylish transluscence :)

The bottom one still looks ok, but much more like cheap glass.  Nice render with all the effects though :)

You can really see the difference in the base where there is that large, relatively flat area of glass. The default settings leave is very noisy and without any subtle details, whereas the transluscent one has this nice, deep, 3D glow to it. Of course the 30x increase in rendertimes mean it's not going to be useful for 95% of scenes... Here's a Bryce 5 (five) render using the same render settings but my own lighting scheme and an image sphere, which is a low-dynamic range "cheat" to give the look of HDRI. You can see the transluscence in the glass block. This scene, however, took 42 hours to render.

Good lord, 42 hours. Anything that long should receive a prize of some sort.

I.....have always preferred sharp-ish glass, so I do like the bottom render of the Stansford statute. But, inner edges are usualy too sharp, imo. I like to render those scenes with a 16 RPP, but again, you are looking at long render times.

I still do appreciate the 5 hour render, yet it does come off to me as something other than glass. Maybe acrylic or plastic? Which is fine. I myself am still trying to master a good plastic mat.

Still the models from Stansford can be big polys, congrats on getting that guy inside of Bryce.

Yeah, it took somewhere around 10 minutes just for the thing to import :-P