Here we go. Same shader nodes, except this prop has a color map and a bump map. The color map goes into the Scatter.

 

Were the leaves of that prop a mesh with volume, or zero-thickness one-sided?

(Yes, I know that this thread is over a year old... but some old threads are like fine wines that have been laid down to mature - they need to be turned occasionally  ;) )

Yesterday I found myself in need of a good leaf shader, and ended up here. The leaves of the ivy I'm using are simple flat trans-mapped squares.

I read bagginsbill's comment about one-sided leaves on page 1 that noted "... Since they have no thickness, scatter doesn't really do its job, which is a big part of the realism of a leaf shader...", so I'm aware of that limitation.

I also noted bagginsbill's comment about saving render time by scrapping reflections - "...you can get back a lot of render time by eliminating the (blurred) reflection...", so I did that.

The ivy I'm using had no bump, so I generated a simple bump map in the shader from the original leaf texture. I also used a clouds node to provide some (hardly noticeable!) colour variation amongst the leaves.

Here's the shader network:

And here's part of the resulting render - Poser 9 Firefly render, auto settings halfway between draft and final with IDL quality increased to 20, IDL (my own worldball with LDR JPG) + an infinite (40degree elevation above the camera):

My guess is that the scatter node isn't doing much (as per bagginsbill's already noted comment) - so the only effect I'm really seeing is the from the specular (Blinn) and bump?

In a totally different thread on IDL and single faced architecture bagginsbill noted that scatter is the 3D version of translucence.

Now, since scatter won't work on many plant leave meshes (including most XFrog OBJs) as they have no thickness, I'm thinking that plain old translucence might be worth a shot? But I don't see any nodes that would perform this function and replace the scatter node. So that leaves the Poser surface translucence. But here's the rub - it always seems to work just like ambient when I use it!

I think the main question I have is this:

Since the scatter node isn't designed to work with one-sided zero-thickness objects, is there a way we can modify the leaf shader to have a translucent/scatter part that will work with all those old plant models that we all have with one-sided zero-thickness leaves?

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The 3Dcheapskate* occasionally posts sensible stuff. Usually by accident.
And it usually uses Poser 11, with units set to inches. Except when it's using Poser 6 or PP2014, or when its units are set to PNU.

*also available in ShareCG, DAZ, and HiveWire3D flavours (the DeviantArt and CGBytes flavour have been discontinued).