Does anyone know the trick to getting this effect? Is it something with textures? I’m referring to the translucent warer/silver look of the cell membrane.
It’s would be modeling a modified geodesic sphere followed by a terrain eroder plugin then painting it with a transparent material. I’ll get you some tutorial samples later tonight
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The time consuming part is creating the transparent PNG image to paint on the front and back surface as a projected material. In this case, a water image seem appropriate to add a little color. But first, I had to be sure the image was ‘tiled’ then the white part was made transparent. I have some Photoshop plugins to help with that, but the same thing can be done with the tools in the image editor. Some texture resources.
Eneroth fractal terrain eroder
I manually created the nubbies to help keep down the initial complexity of the geometry.
More on sculpting in SketchUp.
To finish up, a renderer was most likely used. With a renderer, you may be able to just paint the front with a solid, transparent color and adjust the settings to make the desired wet look.
Whatever you choose to do with the material, there will be visual options if you set the transparency in Photoshop (or another image editor.) Adjust transparency in the Layer. Usually I use File > Save for Web to create the initial PNG. SketchUp faces will cast a shadow when the material is between 100-70% opaque. So if you start with a transparent image, it will start at 100% ‘opacity’ and you can adjust the sliders a bit more and still cast a shadow with a transparent material.
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Awesome!! Thanks for the explanation. 