Faking Translucency

We have already done the major part of this process witch was making the maps that were going to use in combination with the translucency, self-illumination and luminosity attributes. The way were going to connect those maps to those attributes is by using falloffs, the type of falloffs that were going to use this time are called "shadow/light" unlike the fresnel falloff type that deals more with reflections shadow/light deals with mixing to sub-maps or colors together according to areas that have a higher amount of illumination and areas with lesser amount, therefore areas that are more illuminated in the scene will use the color or map corresponding to the light slot, default color white and areas that have less influence will use the color or map corresponding to the shadow slot witch is black by default. We can use this to our advantage for making the translucency, luminosity and self-illumination attributes more apparent in areas that areas that are more influenced by light in the scene and making those three effects less apparent in areas that are less influenced by light.

Apply a falloff map to the translucency slot, change the falloff type to "shadow/light", apply our translucency map to both the shadow and light slots, now what were going to do is to change there influences by simply lowering the output amount of the bitmaps, Since we want the translucency to be less apparent in lesser illuminated areas simply change the output amount for the bitmap in the shadow/top slot to 0.1 under the output rollout in the bitmap's properties and change the output amount for the bitmap in the light slot to 0.5, this way translucency will have only a subtle influence on shadow areas. Now wee need to make some adjustments to the falloff curve, so create two points and adjust them as you see in this image:

This will give the transition between light and shadow areas a little more definition, otherwise the translucency effect would look a little overly exaggerated.

Drag a copy from the translucency channel to the "Extra Lighting" channel, its just self-illumination with a different name, now change the output of the image in the shadow slot to 0.5 and adjust the curves for that falloff to make it look like this image:

Apply a new falloff map the luminosity slot, apply our luminosity map to both the shadow and the light slots, give the image in the shadow slot an output value of 0.2 and the light slide an output value of 0.5, this time leave the curve as is.

That finishes of this section but take note that were recreating the way a leaf would look under sunny/bright lighting conditions, if you made your image in a darker settings you would have to adjust the curves, output amounts and the colors in the translucency/luminosity/extra lighting maps to better fit the desired lighting conditions.