need to create a white material with light coming through?

[rfollett]

I want to simulate the attached image. Will have a label on for logo. What material should I start with?

[mattjgerard]

You can probably use a couple of different starting points, but I've been using cloudy plastics for this sort of thing for a while now. With some tweaking they are very flexible. The tough part is learning what each adjustment actually does, so when the material isn't working right, there is some knowledge to know what to adjust. If you need to see the light tubes themselves, one tip from Eric was to use actually 2 sets of geometry for the lights. One is asn Emissive material that controls what the actual light looks like, then the area light material that is hidden from the camera that actually casts the light.

[rfollett]

thanks, the tower will be closed with light inside and labels for their logo on outside.. I presume the tower wall will need some thickness, rather than just a single rhino surface..

[mattjgerard]

If you can't see the  physical lights, that will be much easier to cheat a bit if needed with the interior lighting setup.
But yes, I would give it some thickness, the Cp's respond better with that I think because in the real world everything has thickness.

[rfollett]

Ideally I guess I would like a thin white plastic that has some transparancy to it that allows the light through, bit like a light box.

[mattjgerard]

I think there are a bunch of different polypropylene and polycarbonate plastics on the keyshot cloud too that you can use as a starting point. The 3mm cloudy plastic in the built in library is what I usually start with if I'm starting from scratch.