Um, sort of, except that it is not necessarily how much light it lets
through, or how much you can see through it...

Opacity and transparency are messures of the same thing... (not to be
confused with transmission of course)  For example, you can give a texture a
transmission of 50%, and no matter how thick the object is, a certain amount
of light (50%) will always go through it... give it 5%, the object can be 1
unit or 1000000 units thick and 5% of the light will still get through.
What translucency does is affect the amount of light that can get through
based on the ray depth and also changes the color of the object based on a
density bias multiplier, applying this to the normal based surface lighting.

The important thing to remember is that the translucency must be object
surface normal independant to get the right effect... (only later is it
applied to the surface normal dependant shader)...

So yes, you're right about the absorbtion but you can't call it transmission
because although it will affect the transmittion of the surface, it has to
be based on the distance (the absorbtion, as you said) AND also affect the
surface itself...

The reason it's called non-directional diffuse reflection is not because it
reflects anything, but because the light reflects of it...  The
non-directional part comes from the fact that the multiplier is
non-directional but it can still be called diffuse because it affects the
diffuse of the object...

Basically to give a REALLY good example of translucency, it's just like
wax... the thicker the sheet of wax (or candle) the less light that will be
able to pass through it... AND, apart from that, the density (or
translucency bias) also affects the amount of light that can pass through...
for example, the denser the wax the less light will get through it...

Did any one get that or did I just make it more confusing?

--
Lance.


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