How to achieve this lighting

Im trying to get a very even lighting on my beerglass. The background and floor are dark…but the beer it self is a light looking yellowish beer. Like this:


My render at the moment looks like this


And Im having problems getting the beer to look so light as the example. You can see different dark spots in the liquid and reflections. I would like to achieve a very smooth and graduate lighting in the liquid, but I dont know to set up the lighting for this. I have tried a backplate with emission…toplight… 3point lighting…I even added emission to the liquid… but none if it give me even lighting on just the liquid…

Can somebody point me in the right direction and tell me how to light this beer so its pretty evenly lit without to many dark areas and reflections… I know the example has dark and highlight…but they are diffused which looks a lot better…

thank you!

mmhh… for me it looks like the “base-colour” of the “beer-material” is quiet the wrong one… More would be able to say with a sample blend-file. Rest (as mine) is only guessing.

Since your scene has a dark background, you will not get, and you will not want the same look as the reference.
Concerning the beer, it needs some subsurface scattering and some roghness to get the right turbidity, than you’ll be able to enlight it from the back.

paolo

https://b3d.interplanety.org/en/how-to-render-an-object-with-reflections-on-a-white-background/

And the “reference” is, quite without a doubt, a composite. The glass of liquid could never be positioned behind such a bottle without the shadow of the bottle being visible through it. (And the “reference photo” might well have any number of other “darkroom manipulations” applied to it.)

Did you happen to observe that the “bottle shadow” at the bottom-rim edge of that glass doesn’t exactly match the outline of that rim? Did you ever stop to ask why the glass has “a bit of business” happening beneath the aforesaid rim, while the bottle has absolutely none? Doesn’t that “BLOND” logo at the top of the bottle – now that you study it more closely – appear in fact to be quite flat?

Notice also that both components have no background. They were all engineered to be composited upon absolutely anything. Each of them could, in fact, consist of multiple other layers which have been composited upon one another. As long as your willing eye would accept that “this is real,” anything is Fair Game.™

Don’t worry about it. Good beers are supposed to be very dark :slight_smile:

A part of your uneven reflections/refractions is because you are using a simple stage (floor and backplane). If you want that evening up, you need a full environment.