Favorite Drink (Revisited)

[Dingurth]

Hey all,

Last year I had an intro to VFX class where the first project was to render your favorite drink. This is the result from that:

That was made in Maya, rendered with Mental Ray. I’m TAing for the same class this semester and thought I’d give the same project another go with what I’ve learned over the year. And this is that result:

Created in Blender, rendered with Cycles, and post work with After Effects and Photoshop. For a while I was dubious as to the result, but after some tweaking in post I think it turned out pretty darn well. I’m pretty proud of my progress, so I thought I’d share and I’d love to hear any comments or criticisms.

[facingbook]

Looks great, though I am probably not at a level to give good criticism yet. Just the table could maybe blend in a little and the liquid in the bottle looks a little different from the one in the glass cup, could be wrong.
I’d buy that

[Dingurth]

Thanks, I tried a couple different things with the liquids because I thought the same thing. After some fiddling and using a bottle for reference, I concluded that the bottle has more of the background refracting through it, whereas the glass mostly has the table and interference from the ice, and that that was the cause of the discrepancy (unless anyone else has some thoughts?).

I’m curious about what you meant with the table. Do you mean it could blend in with the background more?

[Dbugged]

Ok - as a Scotch drinker myself I must frown on the use of ice. But 12-year old Macallan is a bit rough in my opinion so I guess I can overlook that But I think the liquid in the glass should be more transparent. To me it looks a bit more like maple syrup than Scotch. You might have to use 2 separate objects for the liquid in the glass. Can you bake the fluid simulation and just keep the splash part? Then you should be able to make a separate object for the rest of the liquid and make it nice and transparent like what’s in the bottle. Just a thought. Nice job overall!