Yes, that seems like a good way to go about it.
The dither mask makes a semi-translucent material by basically poking holes in the material instead of actually bein translucent. This simply achieves the type of translucency that I want.
The location thing is on purpose. The meshes that I use are small cut out slices of a spherical shell and so their center is one radius away from the actual mesh as you can see here:
The ISM that I want to create is then that one segment simply rotated a certain amount of degrees many times. The result is sort of a sphere made up of these puzzle pieces all centered in the same place as you can see here:
The conclusion being, that they are indeed positioned in a way that does make sense.
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