My Coke


My latest project. Some critique would be appreciated.

There are a few things that I can see to improve.

  1. The out-of-focus cube in the foreground is distracting.
  2. Some condensation on the outside of the bottle might be an improvement.
  3. The cola at the very top of the bottle looks a bit strange (too red).
  4. The label could be a bit more glossy.

Not bad overall a few simple changes could improve it alot.

I don’t know whether you tried to copy the shape of coca-cola bottle but I think your bottle needs a bit stronger curves. Now it’s on kind of an awkward threshold between linear and curvy. If you want to compare yours to the coca-cola you could set it as background image in viewport.

Condensed water drops are the thing you will need in this kind of renders. I recently saw a tutorial on that, I’m sure you’ll find it useful.

Ice cubes are nice but I would try to re-arrange them so that the image composition would work better. Now they are sort of too small (as a graphical component), scattered and alone to balance out the huge bottle catching all the attention in the perfect middle. It’s something you’ll learn as you try, so don’t nail your camera there either. :slight_smile:

The label text is nice but I would include “the fine print”, ingridients, recycling icon, bar codes etc into it for realism. These things won’t probably be readable / totally visible but you can still notice lack of them.

Overall you have lots of things here almost ready, now you just gotta learn about compositions. You can look at other bottle renders and advertisements for inspiration and ideas.

Kheetor and Daniel got a lot of points right. As for me. I think the image is a rather ‘rigid’. It lacks any form of dynamics. You can try some of these:

>Tilt the camera. By tilting the camera you’ll get diagonal lines which are more dynamic and interesting than vertical lines. In your image is dominated by the strong vertical line of the bottle. These is quite too formal and dignified… you know what I mean?

>Add a counterpoint. Add another big object that also draws attention, a second focal point of the image. In images similar to these, the usual counterpoint is a drinking glass with beverage in them. It could also be another bottle or can of beverage.

>Put your focal point off center. Place the bottle slightly to the left or right of the center. Placing the focal point off center is a more interesting composition than placing them on the center.

>Place the bottle in more exciting (and less typical) situation. Say: the bottle plunging in the water, the bottle uncapped with contents gushing out, the bottle slightly covered by a pile of ice cubes. These are more interesting in content that just a plain bottle on a flat surface.

A fresh bottle is generally not dry, I think you should add some mist on it.