We had a job like that a while ago from a pharmaceutic company who had some brilliant idea for their next print ad. They wanted a newton’s cradle made out of water and the spheres at the bottom should be a water shell filled to around 50-60% with water in a completely white circular clinical room. They gave photo reference of a lot of highspeed water photography showing the look of what we were supposed to achieve. They made some snarky comments about how the client is very knowledge about how water behaves etc. and that it had to look photoreal. In the following 2 month we spent in a constant back and forth between them and us telling how refractions and reflections were all wrong (they weren’t at least from an objective standpoint). In the end we had to kill all refractions etc + some real weird photoshop stuff to finally satisfy the client. The end product looked like a bad photo collage of elements without any realism and internal logic. But apparently the client loved it.
Half a year later we stumbled onto the picture we did but heavily modified the geometry etc and all were the same but the water constructions were made to look like chrome.
Personally this was the most frustrating client interaction I have ever had.
@Dmitry
We still love you.