When I posted a series of images featuring some Hans Wegner furniture recently, some people asked about the props and, in particular, the material used for the balloon on the floor.

This is a mundane object, but the material in question turns out to be rather complex. As you can see in the Nodejoe screenshot below, it includes two Vray Materials with different glossiness values nested into a VrayBlendMat, which is itself plugged into a Vray2Sided mat. Bitmaps and falloff maps are used to control both the glossiness and the opacity (different from the translucency). Though slightly complex, the material is versatile as there is only one VrayColor map controlling the entire cascade for the diffuse slot. Tweak this and you get yourself a different coloured balloons.

Rather than do a tut on this, I thought I’d provide the 3ds Max file for anyone interested to have a look. The file, including the geometry, the shaders and the required maps can be downloaded from my TS store here. Feel free to grab it and have fun with it.