Hi all -
New to Vray and this forum and I wanted to say thanks to all the contributors - it’s a great resource and has already been hugely helpful.
I wanted to share my first project in Vray. It’s a bottle that I have now rendered many times in several different packages as I have tested them out and this is the first time I’ve been really happy with it. So far I am *loving* working with Vray.
This project is a remake of a job done last year (by someone else) for the new MGD bottle/label art. I just finished this job using Maxwell and Mental Ray but then I bought Vray and re-did it for myself to test it out. I wish I had Vray before I began this one! It would have saved me a great deal of time and the end product is better (that has a lot more to do with me than the rendering packages, but not all of it).
This shot is scaled down from the 6K original file, and it suffers a bit for the resizing.
The job is done and gone, but C&C is always appreciated in any case.
A very nice clean image, and very well done for your first go at Vray, you making me thirsty.
Can you explain how you created the water droplets/condesation.
i was thinking the beer may be a bit too cloudy but then i read the label…4.7% and with “USA” on it…is that possible?. very nice… i was also wondering about the drops/ streaks, are they modelled?. They look a bit black on the edges
Thanks visumporec, werticus, paulison, and bob-cat!
bob-cat/paulison: The droplets are modelled. I have tried doing them a 1000 different ways but gave up and did it the hard way. We spent the time and sculpted a nice set in Zbrush and built some displacement maps out of those. It works much better IMO. The runs in the center are done with a bit of photo comping and some hand-painting in Photoshop. I had plans to model those too, but we ran out of time.
Paulison: The blackness in the sweat comes mainly from the all black environment. I actually blended a couple of different versions with higher and lower IOR’s on the water to get to this one and minimize some of the black refractions.
I agree that the beer appears cloudy - or the bottle appears frosted on the back, depending on how you look at it - but that is how Miller likes to show their beer here in Canada. They are pretty particular about the density and colour and refractive look of the liquid (You should see their product standard shots!). The alcohol count is correct, it’s imported and brewed for Canada at that level.
Thanks rivoli and Jonas. Yep, I have done this bottle many times now. I’m pretty damn sick of looking at it.
Jonas: I see what you mean about the cap. It could be a modeling thing or it might be the perspective, I’ll have to go back to the Max file and have a look. Thanks.
Really great attention to the materials on this one. The cap and label are very convincing, and you even managed to make the cloudy beer look a bit appetizing.
Those of you who have never had a Miller Genuine Draft, count your blessings. It tastes a bit like Budweiser that’s been recycled from a urinal trough.
Thanks - I spent quite a bit of time on the label materials and was fairly happy with them. They were converted over from some Maxwell versions I had done previously. They should be a bit more metallic to match the real labels, but the client really likes them flat and very vector-ish and I ended up splitting the difference for my own version.
thanks for the kind words. You need to put something behind the bottle that is more “beer coloured” to get a nice tone in it. Try a coloured plane and light it, or use an abstract image in nice warm tones. The latter is how I do it now (with a vray light and a mapped image behind the bottle and facing the camera.
Play with a real bottle to see how it can work to save some time test rendering.
Some of it is also done in post. I render to 32bit files so I can brighten and darken areas quite a bit later on as well.
I am out of the country on holidays so I cannot post anything right now, but it would not be a meaningful comparison anyway. I rendered numerous versions using the different render engines, but they were not really ‘completed’, just partial setups or just meant to be bits and pieces of the final composite.
