I'm new to Blender, having basically only just completed the donut tutorial. I'm making some diagrams for a scientific presentation, which look like this:
I'm reasonably happy with how this looks, but I'm wondering if my method is overkill. To create those bubble-like surfaces I'm doing this:
create a cylinder with about 16 vertices around the circumference, delete the end faces, and add a subdivision modifier
then apply a thickness modifier to turn it into a really thin sheet
in the material, set the transmission to 100%, roughness to 0, and add a volume absorption node. Adjust colour and density of the absorption node to get the colour right, and adjust the index of refraction to change the intensity of reflections.
This looks good, but my thought is that it's simulating the light refracting and bouncing around inside the layer of glass, even though it's so thin you can't really see it. My render times aren't excessive, but I'm rendering on CPU and it would be good to keep them as low as possible, so I'm wondering if there's a cheaper way to achieve the same look.
TL;DR is there a way to 'fake' this look more cheaply than modelling the surfaces as thin layers of glass?
For bonus points, I'd really like to get the background to be pure white, but if I brighten it up too much it's hard to get the bubble surfaces to look good. This is probably a separate issue, but I mention it just in case there's a way to kill both birds with one stone. (The background is currently part of the sky, which is the only lighting in the scene.)
