EVIDENCE BAG
Challenged myself to achieve the transparency effect using only textures, which ultimately turned into an exciting journey of texture creation.
The wrapped object is a pack of cigarettes I made recently (read about the creation process here)
The wrapper itself was created in Marvelous Designer (simulated with negative pressure), with a few additional details sculpted in ZBrush
The baking process was done in Marmoset. The object that’s supposed to be inside (the cigarette pack) is placed in the scene as the high poly, and the wrapper object is assigned to the low poly slot.
For the color, we bake the albedo (metal). Then we need a mask to reveal the color in the areas where the inner object is closest to the wrapper. We have two options for this:
Note: to bake thickness you have to have wrapper object in both high/low poly slots.
Below are examples of the baked maps.
I chose the Height map method. Inside Substance, we create a material (with all channels disabled except for Base Color), where we plug in the baked earlier Albedo (metal) map. Then, using a black mask driven by the cleaned up Height map, the desired effect of fake transparency is finally achieved.
The Thickness map was used for subsurface scattering to help sell the effect. To achieve this, the map was inverted and details such as stickers and adhesive line, were excluded from it. The final scattering map looks like this:
Material overview
Final Base Color maps for both versions
Additionally, the model underwent retopology — from the raw Marvelous Designer topology (~5k triangles) down to just 855 triangles. And textures were baked to the new low poly version.
Here you can see the model and textured details up close
