How to render cloudy plastic in KeyShot

by Will Gibbons | Last Updated:   October 21, 2019

Trying to achieve beautiful cloudy plastic?

Plastic is used on nearly every consumer device these days. Semi-transparent plastic takes a boring product and often makes it more luxurious feeling. Dialing in that material to capture the right amount of cloudiness can be tough though! How do you balance brightness, light transmission and graininess? And the material is super-slow to render, right? Let’s learn how to get around all this.

I’ll teach you how

The key to using the Cloudy Plastic material in KeyShot lies in understanding how the material works in real life and how KeyShot’s settings map to these real-world properties. Thankfully, it’s pretty simple. I’ll walk you through how to dial in your cloudy plastic for that perfect finish. I also created a guide that shows you the outcome of making every incremental change within the material to save you time.

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to:

• Import a model
• Change the HDRI
• Fix z-fighting
• Change render settings
• Create the perfect cloudy plastic material
• Customize the HDRI
• Render a layered PSD
• Use render layers in Photoshop
• Post processing in Photoshop
• How to add spherical lens distortion

Free project files include

• 3D level model (STP)
• Cloudy plastic reference sheets (JPG)
• Reference images (JPG)

Cut to the chase and become a KeyShot master!

It’s honestly the best online KeyShot training available. With 15 hours of 100+ video lessons, follow-along project lessons, feature-based lessons, 14 chapters, project files and quizzes, it’s pretty epic. If you need more convincing, check out the product page with testimonials, course previews and more by clicking here!

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Will Gibbons is an industrial designer-turned rendering specialist. He's trained and worked with some of today's most recognizable brands and now is focused on creating the best product visualization content on the internet.