I decided to challenge myself and try to replicate the picture on right. I know it’s far from perfect and I could tweak it million times, but I thought it was time to let go.
Hardest part was the steam. I tried smoke simulation with wind and vortex force field, but it always spread around like a stormcloud. Then I changed the smoke to liquid (with vortex force field) and broke it with a spherical obstacle before turning it upside down. Of course it’s far from the original, but it’s compact and it has some character to it.
The coffee part was also challenging as I needed 3 different coffee materials. One opaque and glossy for the coffee in the cup, one transparent and glossy for the bubbles and one transparent and not so glossy for the coffee poured into the cup.
The bubbles also had to be lighted separately as any attempt to add emission or brightness to the material made them look flat and cartoonish.
I think you did quite a good job! The pictures are similar enough, and yours looks fairly realistic and comparable to the photograph. Sure, you can nitpick this till the cows come home, but it’s nonetheless fantastic!
The right side is actually the 3D render with image manipulations as bubbles from a glass of coke, cold air on a winter morning as vapor, the image of his living room wraped arround half sphere and some blur filtering of the background. Isn’t it ? …
I never dared to do liquids. How long did it take and have you “liquid experience” ?
Idea: make a fantasy coffee brand, put a package off it in the background, put some 'just for 8.99 $" in front of it and ask some people : “Do you know this Coffee ? It’s just offered in my supermarket.”
It looks real enough if not for the coffee material. In right , we could see some distortion and refraction when the coffee is being poured and in the render , coffee doesnt have any roughness and refraction. i think the liquid sim is good enough and you can put a png of steam infront of the cup , unless you want to do everything from scratch. I’ve to tried to simulate the steam but ended up giving up on it ! .
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