Mirrors and Transparency
I gathered experience with SH3D & textures and learned a lot especially from @Keet and @GaudiGalopin3324, could get the perforation right and made my peace with the not-achieved.
But, the perforated shelves are from Chromium, thus reflective. Task: make a perforated, rough metallic mirror. - So far, I failed on the roughness. However, based on the workflow for semi-transparency, alpha textured mirrors turned out feasible by a technique called "green screen". It consists of map controlled compositing.
For semi-transparency, the mirror's alpha was controlled by a single blending weight. If instead of this global weight, an alpha map is used for compositing, the way is paved for texture controlled reflectivity.
The alpha map results from rendering the transparency texture in front of a green screen, no other objects visible. This time, the compositing took place in Gimp. Intermediate images, *.sh3d and gimp's *.xcf tell much of the story.
The output has severe flaws and errors, but they could mostly be overcome by smarter preparation and more work on the intermediate steps. At least the texture casts a shadow. Peek through the holes in the bottom rows - you can partly see the light ovals. I promise I didn't do any retouching - pure full-frame compositing.
----------------------------------------
Cheers - Joe //
