Texturing Lighting Fixtures

jdellinger98

This is an area I struggle a lot with. How would you texture the green glass shade and a regular cloth shade so that it look realistic when the light is turned on? My knowledge thus far and how I would try to do it is as followed:

Substance painter; using the metal rough with alpha blending shader > then adding opacity as a parameter.

This leaves me with a lamp model that I feel looks very novice. Is there any other parameters I should be affecting? Or should I be trying to do this in the engine itself? (Im using Unreal) 

Any articles, video tutorials, or even just little opinions is greatly appreciated. Free is preferred but, I'm willing to spend 10$ USD for something to look at and use as reference if anyone knows of a good quality asset(s) to use like that.  

THANK YOU!!!!!!

BagelHero

It's generally not opacity, but translucency. Look into subsurface scattering maybe?

ZacD

Easiest way would be to bake out an emissive texture you can turn on and off for the light passing through the shade, that way you can get the feeling of translucency for cheap, and you can tweak the look.

Here's some more in depth resources on making more complex and realistic light fixtures, first one is Unity, but there's still a lot you can learn from it. 

https://docs.unity3d.com/uploads/ExpertGuides/Create_High-Quality_Light_Fixtures_in_Unity.pdf

https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/BuildingWorlds/LightingAndShadows/LightFunctions/index.html