Reply To: Mixing “Principled BSDF” and “Translucent BSDF” an artistic decision?
Ah, gotcha! A 0.5 mix of rough transmission can look like translucency in a lot of situations. I’m not sure how the Blender manual is using the word translucency in that situation though.
You hit on something that I didn’t realize before – these two setups are incredibly close:
Logically it makes sense, but I had never considered it. I wouldn’t say the first one is more physically correct though because the result will often be darker than it should be simply because it’s really complex to trace all those rays and not all of them will find their light. It also requires cranking up the light path bounces which slows things down. I’m not sure exactly when I’d use the rough transmission technique, but I’m sure there’s some situation in which it gives cool results.