After applying the material to the first plant, I notice that the underside of it becomes white. It seems to be being caus...

Question

After applying the material to the first plant, I notice that the underside of it becomes white. It seems to be being caused by the glossy shader. You can actually see glimpses of this effect in the video as well. Do you know what is going on here, and how to fix it?

Answer 1 · 2017-05-23T15:30:31Z

Jonathan Lampel replied May 23, 2017 3:30pm

Great question, it's reflecting the white ground which is a bit unnatural of a setting, so you could change the color of what it is reflecting. When it's in dirt than it won't look so odd. Or, you could use the Geometry node and Backfacing factor to cut out reflections from the underside altogether if need be.

Answer 2 · 2017-05-24T07:07:33Z

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replied May 24, 2017 7:07am

Thank you for your reply. I investigated your explanation but I'm not sure it's correct. As a test, I flipped the plant upside down. I found that the side that was previously on the bottom, and white, was now on the top, and also displayed as white. What I found was that if I flipped the normals of my mesh, the white went away from the side originally on the bottom, and showed up on the original top side. It seems like the fact that this is a 2D object and has glossy enabled gives some kind of artifact? Does this make sense? Is this a known issue? Seems like the ray tracing gets confused for inward pointing normals.

Answer 3 · 2017-05-24T14:03:00Z

Jonathan Lampel replied May 24, 2017 2:03pm

Interesting! I tested it out on just a plane and it doesn't have that effect. Honestly not sure why that happens with the leaf - I'll have to look into it more. Perhaps it has to do with translucency, since that depends directly on the normal direction? Thanks for pointing it out!