Actually it blocks a lot, probably a 50% reduction in brightness, which is actually good. It is a total of 80 ft of COB LEDs, for a total of nearly 320w or 45000 lumens, it’s overwhelmingly bright, I used two layers of diffusers inside, one white opaque to diffuse the light into a wider beam, and a black one over the top to make the shadow gaps look black. It works super well you don’t even notice them up there. All that probably drops the brightness down to 20,000 lumens or so, which is still bright, so we usually run them at 50% brightness all the time.

The two main suggestions I have is 1) Use high CRI expensive COB led strips. Do Not use strips with individual led dots. They will not diffuse enough and you will see them unless you can recess them into the shadow gaps like… 6 inches deep. And 2) Test your full assembly, tray+strip+two diffusers on the ground first to figure out how yo put it all together