Had a bit of fun playing with fluid simulations. C&Cs always appreciated!
It looks brilliant to me. The glass, water, and table are very realistic.
The leaves and background detract slightly from the realism, though I can’t suggest an improvement.
I’d love some insight into your process!
Thanks fikealox! Yeah, I wasn’t too sure about the background myself. I didn’t want to make it too complicated and detract from the foreground, but I think you’re right - it could use some work.
In terms of my process - it’s mainly trial and error! lol. It was my first time playing around with fluid simulations but I remember watching a Blenderguru tutorial a while back where he did something similar, so I had a rough idea of how it worked. It still took several bakes before I got it behaving how I wanted it.
In terms of materials - the glass, water and ice are all simple glass shaders, each with different IOR settings (I googled the correct IOR for each of them). The glass has a droplet normal map applied in certain areas for the condensation. I always find when rendering glass it helps to turn up the transparency bounces to avoid too many weird black artifacts.
Lighting was just from an HDR which I adjusted with a Curves node to get the colour how I wanted. Rendered at 250 samples with the denoiser. Little bit of colour correction in Photoshop and I sharpened the glass a bit to get the droplets looking nice and crisp.