- Did the conversion steps on bottle and water
- Tweaked the water and bottle materials some (eg added a Fall Off using Fresnel to affect the Refraction colour in the plastic to try to draw out the geometry change some more, changed some of the reflectance IOR just for visual looks rather than physical accuracy, adjusted diffuse amounts some, reduced glossiness on the plastic reflection) - all of these can be tweaked some more as it ain’t perfect!
- Didn’t have the map for the cap, did play with the materials some there but you may want to keep your original
- Cut the water off a little bit lower in the bottle, so there is more of a gap with “just plastic” up top
- Rotated the bottle a little, as that helped bring out the features some more
- Removed the overrides as they are not needed - the same thing is now being seen as the background, reflected, and refracted, so is fine just to use the one bitmap in the Max environment
You could also try a background that is neutral but less blurred, a cloudy sky could work for instance (I used a freebie from HDRI Skies http://hdri-skies.com/) - though I’d likely play with the positioning some, I think the current positioning of the ground in the refractions makes it look a bit like an angry Joey 
bottles_scene_edit.max (6.71 MB)
Looks nothing less than awesome now!
I’d really like to check the scene out, however, I can’t seemingly open it with max 2016, it says it needs an actually newer version ( 2017 I guess ?)
As for the earlier comments:
- I also firstly tried to take the bottle to Zbrush and use the tools there to get some better geometry. I tried with Zremesher, it didn’t really give me an adequate result, however, I didn’t insist too much.
- afterwards I tried the method with the various modifiers in Max ( ProOptimizer, Quadrify Mesh, etc), and, althought it looked somewhat better, the smoothing groups were still rather off in some places
- finally, I went for a more simple approach. I removed all modifiers and made a copy of the bottle. Then I used the Push modifier on the bottle and the copy, to practically create the exterior and interior of the bottle. In the end I collapsed everything, I flipped the faces of the interior bottle so they were actually facing the interior, towards the water, and I attached the two pieces together.
Now, looking at the bottle, I’m pretty satisfied with it but there are the following things I still want to work on:
- it is true that I need to play more with the hdr images, the cloudy one is an excellent idea
- I might try to move the lights around to push the highlights to the sides a little
- I sent this result to my client and he mentioned that, although the bottle seemed to work, the contents of the bottle didn’t really look like water. The shot with the bottle in the cloudy environment above comes a lot closer to a water look.
- I also changed the water material with one that is a little darker and has some sort of noise ( I can’t seem to detect it anywhere though )
Uploading the scene again with the new adjustments would be awesome as I’d like to try and play around with it.
You can see how the bottle looks right now in my scene.
So, the question right now would be: is it possible to improve on the look of the water? ( although the version that I can see with the cloudy hdr looks really nice )
Thank you!
From experimenting earlier, my feeling was that the HDRI background is what makes the difference to the water - with a very blurred background, the water becomes “blurry” too, there’s no detail for it to refract in a sharp and clear way. Part of the reasoning I tried out the clouds, and it did seem to help - those can be left unblurred as they are neutral enough as a background that they don’t need to be hidden, and then you have some nice crisp detail there for the water to refract. That may be all it takes for your scene now.
Moving the lighting to catch the edges is a good idea, I did that in the sky version, made the big light vertical (tall and narrow) and moved it to the other side. I’ll see about saving the file out with 2016 compatibility, though you’ll need to grab the HDRI for yourself, although free I am not sure on their rules for redistributing - and you may prefer another HDRI from their site or elsewhere, lots of good ones around with some nice skies and clouds!
Here’s the scene in 2016 format - I replaced the third party HDRI with a simple one of my own rendered out from Terragen, replace as needed! With that, use the U and V offsets in the bitmap to rotate the image to get lighting in a good place, and some nice clouds to refract. Also, replace the bottle object with your remodified version too. Did tweak the water some just to go with this background, added in Fresnel falloff with an output curve to tweak emphasis of edges, but again that can all be done different for the artistic results you are looking for in combination with whatever background you go with etc.
Hope this helps!
bottle_scene_edit4.zip (10.8 MB)
Hello,
Thank you for the scene, I’m going to play around a little more with the hdr map offsetting, and I’ll send the result to the client, I’m really curios what he’s going to think about it.
One more thing though, I was thinking of adding a very faint ao pass over the shot. Is there any way to produce a more explicit ao pass, meaning without the actual shading that gets involved ( like under the kangaroo’s chin and arm )
Thanks!
Not sure how you have the AO set up there - in a separate AO pass (create a CTex render element, and drop the Corona AO into the map for that) there should be no background for one thing, as well as no shadows. This image looks more like a regular beauty pass using AO in the diffuse component? If so, that will definitely still show shadows unless you turn off shadows from the lighting, but still not a good way to render AO for later compositing as a separate layer.
Done in a CTexmap, with settings adjusted to give a very sharp definition to the AO should come out looking something like the attached. It will render at the same time as your beauty pass too.
If you are after some other effect, you could use the AO fed into some blending to, say, darken the refraction colour in those places etc. Depends what effect you are looking for from it.
Hope this helps!
Worked like a charm, thank you!
I was aware, of the method of adding the AO map into a CTex element, I watched it in a very short Corona tutorial on YouTube, however, it’s only now after you’ve explained it better that it crossed my mind there might be settings to adjust and make it better.
I don’t really intend to add an AO pass over the final result of the bottle, I was only asking for my future endeavors.
I’m very grateful for all the help I got on this forum, I will upload the final results that I sent to the client here, so you can see how the shots look after all.
One more final question though. Since I’m a complete beginner to Corona, I would like to ask where I could find some comprehensive video tutorials, preferably ones that work on example scenes, like interior/exterior lighting, still lives, our something automotive. I checked YouTube for once, however, there aren’t that many and I could see that a large portion of them where in Russian, if I’m not mistaken.
Thanks a bunch!
Glad to have helped in any way! I think the final bottles have come out rather nice there, and I hope your client agrees!
Ok on the AO It can be quite a flexible tool so it is good to keep it and the various ways it can be used in mind for future projects!
For videos, all the official ones are at
That section will keep growing over time
Another recent series that was very interesting was the “Making of Cake Please” series which has four parts:
Hello again,
Yes, I couldn’t have done it without your help here, that’s for sure.
Now I’m waiting for the guy to write back to me, but I can see he’s taking his time for some reason.
Also, thanks a lot for the tutorial, it looks amazing and quite ambitious, although I might start with some basic scenes of interiors or exteriors until I get the hang of everything.
I’ll definitely return to the forum if I have anything to clarify.
