Starting help for this effect

Hey guys,

I’m very new to Blender, so I don’t know much about the software right now, but I’m currently crawling through all the basic tutorials on youtube right now. I’m very limited in my time because, I’m in an apprenticeship and I have only a few days to get to know to blender and achieve this specific effect: https://de.fotolia.com/id/68518115

So what I currently focus on, is getting all the specific knowledge, to achieve this effect.

So basically what I’m looking for is some basic orientation. What techniques can I use? Which aspects of Blender should I focus on learning? Is this achievable at all, or is this to much for so little time?

I’m very thankful for every advice.

Thanks in advance!

I would probably use a standard cube, subdivide it a few times and sculpt something like this. So studying the sculpting tools in Blender would be helpful here. In the end use a glass shader in Cycles (one of the renderers that come with Blender) or a transparent shader mixed with some glossy shader.

Took my own shot at that image to see what might work best:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27650383/tomato_splash.png

Modeling-wise this is more tedious than complicated:
The “tomato” shape is basically a cube, sculpted into shape, athough some simple vertex pushing with porportional editing will do the trick as well.The splashes can be done e. g. with metaballs or by extruding/scaling/moving the geometry of a cube mesh (with a Subsurf modifier added to it to round it out).

The hardest part for a newbie will most likely be shading and lighting:
Indeed this might be very cumbersome to get right for someone with little to no knowledge of node-based materials given the little amount of time.

I used a custom glass shader (refraction + glossy) with Layer Weight > Facing + Color Ramp to drive the transition and a blueish-white gradient on the environment map to get more dynamic reflections and to determine the overall color. A combination of several procedural textures serves a a bump map.