I've seen some pretty cool (sexy) plastic clothing, but I am not sure how its done. I have fumbled around a bit with transparency, and applying a plastic texture to a few existing clothing samples with no rea luck.

Could anyone say what the basic steps are to turn an existing clothing item into a see-through plastic type clothing?

make it plastic looking with specular - try alternate specular using one of the lighting, specular nodes.

Try translucency rather than transparency

I turned transluceny all the way up. I also linked the alternate specular to several different lighting type nodes. No change in the material displayed on screen. The only thing that seems to effect it is transparency which you said is not a factor.

Does Poser ship with any plsatic type clothing, or - any other hints?

Thanks

Attached Link: Shader gurus: clear plastic?

Awesome. How did you figure that out Bill?

To be honest, the real trick is how to avoid having clothes look plastic in the first place...;)

In this case I was asking about the transparent plastic effect for sexy plastic clothes, which as Bill's link explains is not something that is all that intuitive to create. I think your talking about a general overal plastic look which is of course another matter.

I would still like to learn how Bill came up with that formula though :-)

Well the actual function is the Fresnel equation, which I simply read off an article at Wikipedia.

Although I have that equation in nodes, it is difficult to remember and build by hand, so I wanted a good approximation that required fewer nodes.

Using a function visualization program called Grapes, I practice making arbitrary curves from math. I do this by entering the real equation, and then visually matching up other, simpler equations. I have done so for hundreds of hours. Using those techniques that I developed through so much practice, I found this general formula was a very good approximation to the Fresnel equation:

(1-C)(1 - A cos(theta)) ** B + C

At the time, I did not know that a particular version of this formula with A=1 and B=5 had been discovered and published by the CG practioner C. Schlick and is known as Schlick's approximation. Had I known of Schlick's approximation, I might never have found my own, which would be a shame. Mine is 5 times more accurate than his.

In mine, A=.18 and B = 30.8.