The COMPLETE Guide to Creating CG Bottle Renders

i'm a 3d artist and i'm going to show you my entire cg workflow for creating bottle renders by the end of this video i will have shown you how to create this scene here [Laughter] [Music] this is the same process i use for client projects such as this this and this for every 10 comments on this video i will give away the project file to someone it all starts off with a blank project straight away i dive into the front view where i'll use a reference image of the bottle we're trying to make you can do this by pressing the middle mouse button or pressing this icon in the top right corner once you're here press shift v to bring up your viewport settings then move to the tab titled back where we can load in a reference image i got this image from a website called saver glass where you can browse through tons of different bottles and download spec sheets with dimensions the bottle we're trying to make for this project is cylindrical so guess what we're starting with a cylinder let's change the height of the cylinder to 24 centimeters to match the spec sheet we now need to scale down the ref image to match the size of our weirdly shaped cylinder press shift v to bring back up our viewport settings let's increase the transparency so we can see our cylinder better and then decrease the size of the image once we get the scale of the image to match the height of the cylinder i can then decrease the radius of the cylinder to match the image you can do this by pressing the little dot on the top right corner of the cylinder and dragging it inwards we then want this reference to line up with a cylinder so i use the offset settings to move it into place i like to have my object sitting on the base of the workplace so we can do that by taking half the height of the cylinder and inputting that into the y position we then press shift v again and use the offset value to line the reference image up next port of cool saving the file you don't want to lose all the hard work we've done so far i'm going to create a backup of this original shape just in case we need it for any reason in the future okay let's get stuck into modeling first press c on the keyboard to make our cylinder editable which will allow us to manipulate polygons points and edges we don't need the top cap of our cylinder so let's go to polygon mode press u out for loop selection and delete this top cap let's subdivide this object to smooth it out hold alt or command on a mac and select the subdivision surface object to automatically apply as a parent let's switch to edge mode which will allow us to move the edges around and create loop cuts let's press ul again on the keyboard so that we can select these lines and move them around the object let's grab the rectangle selection tool and make a selection of the top section in order to scale it down but before we do that we're actually going to use our first modeling tool right click and select loop path cut we can now left click to create additional cuts in our geometry this is how we will build the shape for our bottle let's press t on the keyboard for our scale tool or you can select this icon on the left hand side we don't want this to scale on the y axis so let's come up to the top left and lock our y axis and then start to scale down you can see how this is starting to shape the bottle and this is the process we'll use throughout let's make another loop cut and press the three horizontal lines at the top to center it again press u l for loop selection and then t for scale and let's scale this up we'll continue to repeat this process throughout loop cut loop selection scale loop cut loop selection scale in order to build a shape which resembles our reference let's enable our subdivision so we can see how the bottle looks when it's smoothed out this is looking good so let's continue to add loop cuts and scale whilst in this mode to get a better view on how our bottle is looking whilst in loop mode we can hold shift while selecting edges to select more than one we can then move them up and down just make sure you don't move them on the z axis i'll continue to repeat this process adding loop cuts and scaling to match the profile of the bottle and then enabling subdivision to see the smoothed out version if you want to add more than one loop cut and distribute them evenly create a cut press the three horizontal lines and then press the plus and minus button to either add or subtract from the amount of cuts let's jump out with the front view and into the perspective view to look at the base of the bottle let's start by getting that pesky grid out of the way go to filter work plane to disable it i tend to create a loop cut near the bottom of the bottle and then one underneath to get a nice rounded edge it's then just a case of moving these around until you get a nice rounded edge which matches the reference i added a couple more loop cuts in the center of the bottle just to ensure the body doesn't taper off towards the bottom we want to try to create an even topology so let's add a few more final loop cuts to the body so that they're evenly spaced throughout this is coming together nicely let's revisit this base again and we need to add a few more edge cuts to get the surrounding to look right if i'm looking at some references of bottles they tend to have a line near the bottom where it rounds off so i've recreated that by adding additional cuts very close to each other we can see the pinching in the object where we have created that line subtle details like this will just help to add that additional realism when it comes to rendering later on the final detail of this model is the punt at the bottom yes p-u-n-t this is where it dips up inside the bottle let's go into polygon mode and press u out to select the innermost set of polygons on the bottom we'll then press e for the move tool and move these polygons up we can then press t for scale and scale this so we match the shape of the reference let's enable our subdivision surface again to see how it looks and it looks like we need some additional cuts in order to match it up to the reference you can fiddle with this for as long as you like and i decided to add a few more cuts just to match it up as close as possible to the reference image i think by now hopefully you guys understand the workflow just create your line cuts scale them apart appropriately to smooth them out how much you'd like and then add your subdivision surface to preview it round it out this looks pretty good to me and i think with a few more final changes to the bottle we're pretty much bang on to the reference image that we started with and we can now move on to the next step before we start working into the details of this i'd like to create a basic lighting setup in order to check everything looks okay let's create a redshift camera and set the focal length to 80 millimeters to make it feel more graphical i then move the camera around using the four different views until we center the bottle into the middle of our frame let's add a dome light and search for a suitable hdri i'm using one from poly haven and it's a studio hero you should definitely check out their website my go-to is the studio small zero five with the introduction of aces as the default color space it's essential that we assign our colors with proper color space for hdris let's set it to working space linear rec 709 srgb this will just ensure that we get more accurate colors let's disable the background and remove the saturation let's press r for the rotate tool and start to rotate this around to check out the different lighting we're looking out for any areas in the model where it doesn't quite look right for example this line at the bottom looks too harsh if we increase our image resolution we'll be able to zoom in more into our image and just look closer at this detail let's change our render view mode to original size which will now display at the resolution we just set now we can zoom in closer on our object to see our render better in the viewport let's disable materials and set it to quick shading the rest of the model looks good to me so let's just fix that line at the bottom if we move the lines apart ever so slightly this will help to reduce the pinching of that line and just soften it ever so slightly while still retaining that detail one last check and i think everything is looking good to me we'll add a few more line cuts just to even out the topology and now we're ready to move on to the next step in order for this bottle to calculate the reflections and refractions properly we need to add thickness we'll quickly create a backup of this model just in case we need it at any point in the future let's take our model out of the subdivision surface and duplicate this by control and dragging the layer let's go into polygon mode and select all by pressing ctrl a there's a couple methods of creating this thickness but we're going to use a tool called the normal move this will allow us to scale our polygons based on their normals just right click scroll down and select normal move and now we can click and drag to move our object inwards a mover value of minus 0.25 looks about right but it's worth experimenting with this to see what different results you can get the only issue with normal move is that it will sometimes collapse polygons in on themselves so let's go into edge mode and fix some of these you may notice when you zoom in you get some clipping you can fix this by pressing ctrl d to bring up your project settings and then changing the view clipping to small okay let's press u out for loop selection and start to reposition these edges which are messed up you can then go in and scale up and down and reposition the edges throughout the rest of the bottle to try to keep the thickness consistent throughout although it can help with realism to add some variation this all looks good to me so let's rename this layer to keep things nice and organized we'll also control and drag this layer just to create a duplicate as we'll use this for the liquid later in order for refractions to be calculated properly when we connect these two objects we need our normals to be facing outwards so let's go to polygon mode select all and then right click and reverse normals we need to connect both of these objects so let's select both of the layers right click and select connect objects and delete we now need to fill this hole at the top and luckily this can be done pretty easily using a tool called the bridge go to edge mode and then right click and select the bridge tool now we can just click and drag to connect one edge to another and we're going to do this for the whole top of this glass bottle it can be easily done to accidentally connect the edges you don't want to so just have ctrl z on standby let's hit ctrl a to check our normals they're all orange which means they're facing outwards which means we're good to keep going let's add a subdivision surface just to check how this is looking and it's looking pretty good to me but i do just want to make some adjustments to the lid i'm going to go back into edge mode and just start to move around some of these different edges just to smooth things out we can remove unwanted edge cuts by using loop selection mode right clicking and pressing dissolve this is feeling much better and i'm just going to make some final adjustments to the lid and then we're ready to move on to the next step which is making the liquid let's just quickly keep things organized and rename our layers let's take the inner wall we saved them earlier and we're going to use this for the base shape of our liquid in order for liquid to calculate properly it needs to intersect the inner wall ever so slightly we can do this by using the normal move tool from earlier to scale this up ever so slightly well then grab the rectangle selection tool go to edge mode and delete the top portion when it comes to the bottom of the liquid i actually find that not intersecting it with the bottle gives you more realistic results and despite it not being technically correct i do think it looks better in the end to do this let's go to polygon mode and loop selection and select the polygons on the bottom and then just move them ever so slightly upwards so they're back inside the bottle let's quickly create a subdivision surface for our liquid and preview the wireframe for both of these objects this looks pretty good to me and as we can see the liquid intersects slightly apart from at the bottom where it overlaps and returns back inside the bottle again for refractions to be calculated properly we need to close the hole at the top of the liquid we can do this while right clicking whilst in polygon mode and selecting close a polygon hole let's select this new face and use the inset tool to extrude this inwards and create some topology we want this to have quad topology so let's zoom in and fix the topology at the center this time we're going to use the line cut tool and cut lines in order to create quad-based polygons you can follow my approach here by cutting three times vertically and three times horizontally until you're left with this grid shape this is looking much better but our liquid is too rounded on the edge so let's add some additional loop cuts finally to simulate surface tension we need to edit our liquid so it curves towards the edge of the bottle to do this let's move the outermost edge upwards and we may also have to reject some of the other edge cuts to sharpen this edge even more i decided to dissolve some of the edges to make the curve smoother and then go into polygon mode and select the innermost polygons and move them down slightly to make the curve more prominent the reason for creating this surface tension is that when it comes to rendering this will give the liquid line some thickness which will help to increase the realism i almost forgot let's convert the bottom of the liquid and the bottle walls to have quad topology as well for this we'll follow the same method as we did for the liquid using the line cut tool in this case we need to remove the polygon so let's right click and press mount and now we can add our own line cuts using the line cut tool i'll then repeat the same process for the outer and inner wall of our bottle this time however we need to make a loop cut first melt it and then create the line cuts having a quad based topology like this will optimize our model for subdividing and also for uv unwrapping and that is the liquid ready to go so the final part of the modeling is to do the lid unfortunately we don't have a reference for this so i just did it by eye and i've also sped it up since we're using pretty much the same techniques that we've covered so far in this video but if you do want to go through you can slow this video down and just watch it step by step but it really is pretty simple before we move on to modeling the label let's actually get rid of these subdivision surfaces and start using the redshift object tag just right click on one of our models go to redshift tags and redshift object and then go to the geometry tab and enable tessellation this will subdivide our object whilst keeping it low poly in our viewport we can then control drag our redshift object tag to the rest of the models and just like that we have a lovely subdivided model whilst keeping it low poly okay on to modeling the label there's quite a few different approaches depending on the type of label you're trying to produce for this project i used a plane and a bender former to wrap it around the object whereas on this one i actually made the label within the same glass material if you want to know more about that check out my video about how to texture a wine bottle we're actually going to use a different technique for this project we're going to select a bunch of polygons and then split these to give us the shape for our label let's duplicate this label and subdivide it with a subdivision level of three and then right click select children and connect objects and delete we'll then right click and select split which will split this polygon selection to a new layer and we can delete the original layer let's add some thickness to our label press shift c to bring up our search menu and hold alt whilst you select cloth surface to make it apparent we'll then reduce this subdivision to zero and add a thickness of 0.01 i decided to shrink the size of the label slightly so using loop selection mode i selected the outer ring of polygons and then just hit delete and just like that we have modeled our label but more importantly our bottle now it's time for everyone's favorite part of the process uv unwrapping uv unwrapping is the process of creating a flat surface from our 3d model so that we can easily apply textures let's start with a label we'll select our object and go to the top right and switch to our uv edit layout this object only has one side to it so all we have to do is press uv unwrap if we go to textures and select uv map we can preview this with a coloured checkerboard to ensure the map isn't stretched this looks good to me so let's save this out in the uv editor window go to file new texture then we can name our uv texture and choose our wanted resolution let's name this bottle label uv and set the resolution to 4k let's increase the bits per channel to 16 bit which will help us with texturing down the line then we need to go to layer create uv mesh finally let's go to file save texture as changes to psd and hit ok then save your file on the appropriate folder and we're all done and dusted for the label for the rest of the model which is slightly more complex i like to use a different software called rhizome uv rhizome uv is a software which solely focuses on uv unwrapping models and i find it much easier and quicker than cinema's tools luckily there is a bridge plug-in so you can export your model straight from cinema 4d to ryzen so let's select the bottle and get straight into it ryzen will try to uv unwrap your model for you but i want to start from scratch so let's go to file reload now we have a model which we can begin to uv unwrap let's start by going to edge mode and making some cuts on our object we can double click to make a loop selection of our object and if we hold ctrl we can continue to make multiple selections let's start by making two selections on our lid and then work our way down to the bottom of the bottle whilst continuing to hold control let's make a selection towards the base here and then let's move inside and do the same on the inside then let's make it cut down the side which will allow us to lay the body of the bottle flat again let's do the same for the inside now if we hit c on the keyboard we can turn those selections into cuts our line should turn orange to signal this we're ready to unwrap press ctrl a and go into polygon mode and then press the u logo at the top of your viewport to unwrap our object and just like that we have great looking uvs already let's create a separate uv for the neck so we'll go to edge mode and create a cut around the top and bottom of the neck there's a great tool on ryzen for straightening our uvs out let's do this for the neck and the body first let's go to island mode and then select the uv map for our neck we can then go up to the align menu in the top right and select this icon here to convert the uv map to a rectangle this makes it much easier to work when it comes to texturing let's repeat this for the body of the bottle as well finally let's press this icon at the top to arrange all our uvs if you decide you want to undo a cut you can select the edges you want and then go up and press the weld tool in the top left you then need to unwrap your model again and if you want to preserve the location of the rest of the maps just select the island you want to update and press unwrap i decided to readjust some cuts at the top of the bottle as well as cutting edges inside which i forgot to do earlier these are just a duplicate of the ones outside if you want to check the orientation of your uvs and make sure they aren't stretching you can press this checkerboard icon here as we can see the uvs of our body are upside down so let's use the align menu to flip these we'll then reorganize the layout again finally i decided to move the cut closer to the bottom so we have more room on the body of the bottle for details which we'll look at later because we've made an adjustment we need to update this island one last time and let's press the layout icon to optimize the map and just like that we have a lovely uv unwrapped bottle because we use the bridge to open rhizome all we have to do is press ctrl s to save and we'll be brought back to cinema with our updated model and uvs now we need to go to uv edit mode so we can save these uvs and this is the same process as last time so go to file new texture layer create uv mesh and finally file save texture i then repeated the same process for the lid which i will quickly speed up as it follows the exact same techniques we've just used now it's on to the fun part of the process which is texturing where we can finally dial in the detail for our models let's start with the label we'll open up the photoshop file we made using the uvs from earlier i have a label here which i prepared for this tutorial using adobe illustrator let's select the label and press ctrl c to copy it and then go to photoshop and press ctrl v to paste it in the 2022 version of photoshop we have the option to paste as layers which is the method that we'll use let's create an alpha mask from the label design by creating a black background and converting the design to white let's export this as a png so we can bring it into cinema now we'll create a bump map so that we can create embossed text in cinema 4d i start by converting the layers to smart objects which will allow us to apply smart filters while keeping it non-destructive let's use the gaussian blur effect to soften the text layers which will give us a soft embossed feel and cinema we can then dial in a blur amount which we think is appropriate just keep in mind the more you blur it the softer the embossing will be in cinema i like to find a value which gives the text a soft edge without completely blowing the whole text layer the beauty of using smart objects is that we can tweak the smart filters but we can always go back to the original version we had okay let's save this one out as a png as well and we'll call this one a bump okay let's dive back into cinema and create a new redshift material and load in our new label texture i have a shortcut setup to load mine in but you can press shift c to bring up your node menu and then type in texture node and grab a texture that way before we link this up let's make a gold material for our label let's go to the preset menu and select gold let's change the fresnel type to ior advanced which i find gives us a nicer looking gold color let's press shift c to bring up our node menu and grab a material blender node which we'll use to blend between the gold label material and the label design we made plug our gold material node into the base color of our material blender and then plug this into the output surface let's grab another material node and change the diffuse color to black i always try not to go all the way to zero percent as nothing in real life is fully black we'll then link this into layer color one of our material blender to transition between these two materials we'll use the label design alpha we made earlier redshift uses aces as its default color space so we need to assign the color space of our textures appropriately for black and white images we need to set it to raw now let's plug this into blend color one of our material blender and preview this in the render view let's rotate the dome light to get a better view of the label let's increase the reflection roughness because the gold material is slightly too glossy right now this looks much better already let's duplicate our texture node by holding ctrl and dragging and we'll update this with our bump map texture press ctrl c to bring up our node menu and let's grab a bump map node we'll plug our texture into the input of the bump map and then the bump map into the bump input of our material node we'll add a little bit of roughness to our text layer just so it smoothes out the reflections let's create a close-up camera so we'll duplicate our current one by control dragging and then we'll move it around using the icons in the top right let's zoom in closer on the bottle and if we select our camera we can use the rotation parameters to tilt our camera let's hit play on our redshift render view and see how it's looking we'll then rotate our hdri around so that we can see how the label reacts to the light i think we need to reduce the bump amount as it's too intense right now let's rotate the hdri again and this time see how it reacts to the light looks pretty good to me if you wanted you could invert the bumper mount to make it a d boss instead of an in-boss let's make this gold label feel more realistic by breaking it up with some speckles which we'll do using an image texture let's go to a site called ccotextures.com and search for a paper texture this site is great because everything is in the public domain so you can use these textures however you'd like whether that's for personal or commercial work i'm going to download paper o2 which we will use for the bump and reflection roughness of our gold material let's drag the normal map into cinema 4d let's set the color space to raw and then plug this into the bump map we'll also change the input type of the bump map to tangent space normal as we're using a normal map finally i dragged in the roughness map and plug this into the reflection roughness of our gold material now our label looks really matte so we need to add a ramp node and recolor this roughness map press shift c bring up your node menu and we'll grab a ramp node and then plug texture into this and plug the ramp into the reflection roughness let's output the ramp texture to our surface just so that we can preview it easier let's darken this image which will then increase the glossiness of our gold material we can do this by dragging our sliders inwards to increase contrast and then reducing the white value to a gray let's output our material blender and have a look at it now this looks much better let's move on to the texturing of the bottle where we will start to add embossings which will really help to add realism to our render let's move to adobe illustrator where we will use our reference image and start detailing our bottle let's put this in the template layer which will lock it and fade it slightly and now we're going to recreate these embossing details from the spec sheet let's start with creating those dots let's grab the ellipse tool and then let's make a circle and line it up with the circles on the reference image let's rotate these around an axis press r for the rotate tool and if we hold alt command we'll see three dots appear left click and we'll get this rotate menu pop up we can now type 360 followed with a forward slash and then the amount of circles we want to create then hit copy now we can press ctrl d which will continue to duplicate our object based on the amount of times we set around that 360 degree angle unless you want to count up exactly how many circles there are and maybe a bit of trial and error until you get the right amount let's repeat this same process with the outer circles for the text in the center we can create a circle and use the type along path tool to create our curved text for the rest of the icons i just use the circle rectangle and pen tool to create them pretty simple stuff let's scale this up so when we paste into photoshop it's nice and high res to ensure strokes scale properly go to window transform and enable scale strokes and effects let's scale this up and i'm also going to duplicate it and make the next one editable so let's go to object expand and this will just make sure that when we paste it into photoshop it gets pasted correctly let's paste this into photoshop using the layers mode and position it into the correct area of the map i'll then tidy up our layers by grouping them and converting them to smart objects ready for when we create our bump maps then we'll move on to setting up the details which you see at the base of a bottle such as production numbers and those little bumps we'll convert these to smart objects and change them to white ready to blur and turn into a bump map we'll do the same for the rest of the details to export this for cinema 4d let's create a new layer and fill it with black and now we can export this as a png back in cinema 4d let's start building our bottle material we'll create a new redshift material and drag this onto our bottle let's brighten our diffuse slightly and then start applying our bump material remember to set the curve space to raw let's link this into our bump map and then into our material i'll decrease the height scale to 0.01 let's press play in the red shift render view to check it out and voila we can see the embossing is coming through the bumps on the bottle currently feel too soft so let's jump back to photoshop and reduce the blur this feels better let's move on to creating the embossing for the rest of the bottle i wanted to create stripes down the bottle so i had this idea of using a rectangle with a repeated black to white gradient but it didn't quite give me the look i wanted so let's just zoom past that and use a different method here we are in photoshop with our failed attempt but let's start from scratch and create a rectangular selection and fill it with white let's convert this to a smart object double click the layer to open up the layer style and add a gradient overlay let's set this to a simple black to white gradient and set the style to be reflected let's change the black to a gray color which will make the fall off of our bump much smoother in cinema hold alt whilst you drag it to duplicate our rectangle until we duplicate and fill that whole uv map let's select all the layers and press ctrl t for transform and then scale these down so they're not as wide we'll then alt drag these again to duplicate and fill the rest of the map press control g to group all these layers and then right click and convert the smart object let's enable our black background we'll then create a layer mask which we'll use to fade out the top and bottom of our stripes remember setting the brush color to black will mask out and white will mask back in you can use the shortcut x to quickly swap between your foreground and background colors we'll then add a subtle blur to our stripes so that the edges of each stripe aren't so harsh okay this looks good let's export it as a png we're going to blend this bump map with the one we made earlier so we need to create a bump blender hit shift c to bring up your node menu and then let's grab a bump blender let's control drag our current texture and bump map node to duplicate it and then let's load the new embossings into that image texture let's plug the new bump map into the input of the bump blender and then output the bump blender into the bump input of the material this is looking good but let's increase the bump amount to 0.1 just to make this more prominent let's now link the other bump map into the bump blender by plugging it into bump input 0 and then increasing the bump weight all the way up to 1. now it's hiding our other bump map so in order to be able to see both of them we just need to enable additive mode let's fine tune the embossing around the label so that it feels a bit more bespoke let's switch to uv edit mode to find the polygons where the label is well then head to photoshop to mask this area out now we're in photoshop and we just need to find the same area and mask it out from the stripes let's put the stripes into a group and create a layer mask which we can then use to mask out this label area we'll create a rectangular selection and fill it with black to mask it out now we just need to readjust the stripes so that they line up with both edges of the empty area where the label is going to be this is a really small detail but it will really help to add to the realism of the final render also i'm a bit of a perfectionist so i literally couldn't continue without getting this bit done let's put this into another group with another layer mask which we'll then use to soften the edges of the label area we'll use a soft brush to fade away these edges until we get a result we're happy with we'll export this for cinema 4d and refresh the render view to see how it's looking at this stage it's a case of going back and forth between photoshop and cinema making tweaks until we get into a place we're happy with this looks pretty good to me now let's finish this off by texturing the lid i feel like we've covered all the principles for how i texture using illustrator photoshop and cinema so i'm going to zoom through this part let's give this lid a wooden finish we'll go to our best friend aka ccotextures.com and grab a wood texture wood052 looks good to me let's load in the color normal and roughness maps we'll output the color texture to the surface and then solo out the lid so we can see how it looks by itself i want the neck of the lid to display the wood texture vertically so let's go into the uv edit mode and rotate our uvs jump into polygon mode and select the next using loop selection remember ul for shortcut we'll then move into the uv editor and press r for rotate hold shift to rotate incrementally and rotate it at 90 degrees press e for the move tool and move the uv island so it isn't overlapping anything else let's go back to the startup layout and refresh the render view bea youtube let's edit the color of this wood slightly drop down a color correction node but first don't forget your color spaces set it to raw for normal and roughness maps and srgb for the color texture okay let's plug our color texture into the color correct node and then output that to the surface so we can preview it let's increase the brightness and reduce the saturation slightly let's pump some of that color back in we'll wire this into the material base color and then output the material to the surface looking good to finish this off let's plug in the normal map and play with a roughness map to add some additional detail i also tweaked with a bump of the text to make the embossing feel more natural let's disable solo mode so we can see the whole bottle okay it's the final push now let's update this clay material to glass and then get our liquid in there let's select our bottle material and choose glass from the preset menu let's create our liquid create a new material and drag it onto our liquid model using the lovely preset menu again let's select the water this is just a placeholder for now but we'll come back later and refine this and change the liquid color let's grab a dome light and load in a hdri i'm just using an abstract hdri which gives us some nice and quite interesting results now we're working with something let's rotate our dome light and see what different results we can get this is looking good for now those glass details are boston as a last minute change i decided to change the lid from wood to gold to match the texture of the label for everyone always asking my render settings this moment's for you let's dive into the settings and bring out some more detail in our glass switch our settings mode to advanced and go to the globals tab then bump up the refraction to 6 and the combined depth to 12 and straight away we can see more detail in the refraction of our glass if you wanted to we could also tint the color of the glass just dive into the refraction color and add some hue and saturation you can also add a similar shade in the transmittance color so that the tint becomes more saturated within the object let's leave this on a bluish tint for now and let's dive into the lighting in this section we'll look at adding additional lights in order to bring more detail into our bottle let's start by adding area lights to introduce highlights to the front of our bottle we'll add a target tag to our area light and then drag a bottle label into the target object let's lock our render view to the current camera so we can jump out of the camera in the viewport and start moving the light around the key here is to use these area lights to help give some shape to the bottle in this case we can do this by placing an area light to the left and right of the bottle to help accentuate the curves at the moment this area light looks too harsh so let's introduce a gradient texture to give it a soft falloff i'm using a gradient texture from grayscale gorilla but you can make your own if you want straight away we can see the falloff that this texture provides but we want it to fade towards the center instead of the bottom so let's rotate this light this looks much better now let's scale it up and move it more to the left so that it really hits the side of the bottle it feels a bit bright at the moment and it's taken away from the color of the glass so let's drop the exposure slightly this feels more natural and now we can do the same for the other side control and drag your area light to duplicate it we need to rotate the area light again so that it fades towards the center let's play with the position and exposure of this light so we get a nice highlight to fill the right hand side of the bottle if we change the mode to color and temperature we can tint our light while still using the gradient texture playing with warmer and cooler temperatures can add some more depth to your lighting and help to blend it in with your object more i still feel like both of the area lights are slightly overexposed so let's just drop down the intensity slightly we'll create one more area light to highlight the label and make it stand out control drag your light to duplicate it we'll scale this light down and move it more towards the center and disable all the other lights so we can focus on this one for now let's swap this out for a reflected gradient texture so that it fades out on both sides let's increase the height of the light so that we can catch some more reflection on the rest of the bottle the gold label feels quite matte now so let's edit our roughness map to make it more glossy we can do this by dropping the white value down to a gray and now we have more glossiness in our label this label light feels quite overexposed so let's drop down the exposure slightly let's finalize the glass and liquid materials and then also experiment with some different lighting options let's open up our glass material and change the refraction color to white we'll also do the same for the transmittance color next onto the liquid let's change the refraction color to a warm orange to reflect the color of room to add some more variation we'll add a warmer tone to the transmittance color and change the absorption scale to 0.05 so more of a warm color is absorbed this looks good to me now we can play with different hdris and rotations to give us completely different results to our liquid for renders like this i tend to use blurred abstract hdris to give the liquid some interesting variation i quite liked the result i got from using a simple spotlight hdri and increasing the exposure slightly to make the liquid have a subtle glow to it it's worth noting that in order for the liquid to appear you do need to have the background of your hdri enabled if it's disabled the liquid will disappear as the environment illuminating it isn't actually visible this does mean that if you wanted to render this out without a background you'll have to set up some aovs such as a crypto map or puzzle map to then mask it out in post-production luckily this is something we're going to go over later on in the video taking everything we've learned so far let's create a scene using our bottle which we will then render and edit in after effects most of the scene setup is fairly straightforward so i will speed up some of it and then talk through the key parts also check out my gumroad for the glass model to start off i'm experimenting with compositions which i think work well for this scene i'm using two objects a cube for the floor and a plane for the back wall so it's pretty simple i started lighting the scene using a redshift sun and sky object because i wanted to go for quite a daylight sunny feel to the piece i updated the small glass to be clear and then filled it with the same liquid material as the rum bottle i then continued to play with the layout of the bottle and the glass and i wanted the bottle to be the hero of the piece so i bring it closer to the foreground i experimented with removing the wall to create a very clean background but i felt it lack some depth to increase the softness of the sun go to the sun tab and increase the sun disc scale i increased it to five just to add a subtle blur to the shadows i then created a material for the floor all i did was change the diffuse color to blue as i felt like this would contrast well with the orange color of the rum using the same principles from earlier i created some area lights to highlight the left and right hand side of the bottle this is to make the bottle stand out from the background and to make it feel more of the hero of the shot i decided to bring the wall back into the shot which i think makes the layout feel more interesting i want this piece to feel more dramatic so i decided to experiment with an area light instead of using the sun and sky object as always i apply a target tag to my area light and use the bottle as the target object i move the light around so it's hitting the object from the left and i turn down the spread to make the light sharper i position the light in a way which puts the bottle in the spotlight whilst keeping some of the background in the shadows this helps to separate the foreground and the background and bring more focus to the bottle i bring the glass back in frame so there is another object to balance out the composition and i then rejig both objects until i'm happy with their placement i then continued to tweak the lighting ever so slightly and re-enable the liquid in the glass in real life these objects would cast caustics so let's enable this in the details tab of our area light i also made sure to add a redshift object tag and enable cast caustic photons on my bottle and glass we need to enable bucket rendering to see our caustics so let's do that and check the result this is looking way too noisy which means we need to increase the amount of photons being casted by our light but first i want to address our area light which is being used to cast highlights onto our bottle let's increase the height of the light so that the reflection catches more of the bottle and then move it more to the left so it acts as more of a rim light okay let's revisit the core 6 light and bump those photons way way up let's try 10 million i slightly reposition the area light so the shadows are being casted closer to the camera we then need to add a fill light for the black area in the bottom right corner for this i use an area light with a gradient texture which gives us a good hit of contrast in the corner let's do another bucket render to see how it looks with the increased amount of caustic photons this is looking much better but i do feel like the label is getting lost let's create another area light and move it around to the front so that it lights up the label before wrapping this scene up and moving on to rendering i make some final tweaks to the lighting such as scaling down our key light to make it sharper and also disabling a dome light which i didn't realize i had enabled in the scene this added some more contrast and just gave the scene a bit more of a feel and a mood to it let's do one last bucket render to check everything over and then we will set up the render settings for it to be exported and edited in after effects because i may need to adjust different areas of this render in post-production let's set up some aovs these are some of the most common aovs and the ones that we will need for this render simply drag and drop them from the list cryptomats and refractions will be particularly important let's dive into some of these settings and get ready to export first let's make sure the format is set to open exr 16 bit will be fine for this then choose your output location i also like to disable multi-layer files so i have separate files for my aovs i'll lock the aspect ratio and then double the size of the output so it's higher res since this is just a still image and the render times won't be too crazy i'll leave it on automatic sampling as are we converting to aces and after effects let's change our view type to raw and uncheck compensate for view transform this will give us much more flexibility in after effects when it comes to color correction everything else looks good to me so let's hit that render button in the next and final stage of this workflow we will look at how we can use post production to take this render to the next level we're in after effects let's import our exr files from our render let's drag the beauty pass into a new composition press ctrl shift y to create an adjustment layer and then search for color io in the effects and presets panel you'll need to download this effect from this website if you don't have it already select configuration and then custom search for your ocio file again if you've never installed this before you can find it online i'll drop it in the description down below let's change the input space to aces cg and the output space to srgb now let's apply one more effect called color profile converter change both the input profile and output profile to srgb but under output profile enable linearize output profile you should now see the asus result we had in cinema 4d if you're not seeing the same result go to file project settings color make sure you're using 32 bits make sure your working space is srgb and then make sure linearizer working space is enabled it's worth noting this asus conversion should be the very top layer except for some effects which we'll discuss later let's start by bringing in our crypto map aov arguably one of the most powerful aovs we'll use by default we won't see anything but we can fix that by applying an effect called crypto map now we have a color id for every object in our scene whilst having the crypto map effect selected we can simply click in the viewport to isolate different masks hold shift and you can continue to add to your selection we can then change the output to matte only to create a black and white mask from our selection let's drag in our specular aov and use this crypto map to mask it out simply select loom amount inverted on our specular lighting layer which will mask it only to black areas of our crypto mat layer now we have hidden our liquid so let's bring in our refraction pass let's change it to linear dodge to overlay this layer we're nearly back to where we started let's just bring in our reflections pass and we should be there if we compare this with the original we should now have the same result the beauty of this is that now we have control over each aspect of this render separately this is where the magic really happens currently the liquid doesn't look very interesting but this is where we can use the power of compositing to take it to the next level first we need to hop back to cinema 4d what we're going to do here is render additional passes for just the liquid you can see i set up multiple dome lights with different hdris at different angles causing the refractions to create different results and therefore create additional renders for the lick for this to work best i will disable all other objects and lights in the scene so we're purely just getting refractions from our dome lights the first one for example is giving us a nice glow at the bottom of our bottle something which was lacking before i encourage you to play with your hdris and see how it reacts to your bottle and liquid you may get some really interesting results now it's a case of stacking as many different light setups as you'd like and then rendering each one out separately in total i made four additional light setups which we will now export and add in after effects for these renders all we need are refraction passes so we can disable the other aovs for now remember to set up your color space properly as we are doing the asus conversion in after effects i've already got these rendered out so let's hop back to after effects let's drag in our first additional refraction pass we'll set this to linear dodge and watch the magic happen beautiful look at the difference okay let's keep stacking these and see the result that we get for the last one i'll bring up the opacity menu by pressing t and reducing this to 25 we can see a huge difference in our render from having those additional passes and now it feels like a professional product shot now let's dive into some color correction this comes down to personal preference but i will run through some of the tools that i use for my renders let's grab a hue and saturation effect and apply this to our new adjustment layer we'll use this to shift the liquid to a slightly warmer tone it's a subtle difference but these details really do add up let's grab another effect called lumetri color and this is where we'll do the most of our color correction this is a really powerful color correction effect and it really depends on your render but you can use this to push and pull highlights shadows adjust toning and apply color correction presets i've used it here to pump some more contrast into the scene as well as increase the saturation of the blues next i want to tackle the floor as it feels quite overexposed and is distracting from the bottle let's grab another adjustment layer and use our crypto map to mask it to the floor we can press ctrl d to duplicate our previous kryptomat layer and then press reset to get all our masks back we'll then set our adjustment layer to luma matte so it only applies to the floor let's grab a levels adjustment and start tweaking with the settings to even out the lighting of this floor this looks better already although we have lost some colour and contrast let's add a curves and a hue and saturation to bring some of that back in this looks so much better and definitely helps to make the glass and bottle stand out let's add another adjustment layer this time with hue and saturation to adjust the blues in the image the floor has some more color to it now helping to further more create that contrast between the orange and blue a couple more tweaks left let's make another adjustment layer this time using a crypto mat to mask it to the floor and wall we're going to use an effect called selective color for this adjustment layer notice how it was a warning sign next to it this means that it only works on 8 16 bit projects so we have to drag it above the aces layer otherwise it won't display properly selective color can be used to tin and adjust specific colors so we're using it to brighten the floor and wall whilst keeping them saturated this adjustment makes the blue tones feel a bit more natural and complement the orange tones better we can see from the before and after how we also lifted the black so it doesn't feel as dark let's duplicate this adjustment layer and crypto map but this time set the adjustment layer to luma invert matte so it only affects the bottle and glass we'll then reset the selective color and this time just edit the black tones this is really powerful because we can use this to recolor shadows and in this case use it to recur the liquid and eliminate any dark patches we can see how we've used this to create more contrast whilst injecting some warm tones into the shadows let's create one final adjustment layer and then i think we'll be done let's add an effect called noise hls this is a great effect for creating grain because it bases the noise off hue lightness saturation so you can really fine tune the look of it i find using some grain helps to add realism to the render as it mimics the noise you would get in a photograph taken by a dslr camera let's look at the original render we started with what we have created using post-production techniques is worlds apart from the surrender that we're seeing here the before and after truly feels like night and day the result we have been able to create using some additional passes is truly something special and i hope if you take anything away from this video it's just how powerful post production can be i hope you found this video helpful if you did hit that like and subscribe button and thank you for watching

Channel: Ross Mason

Views: 184,567

Keywords: iamrossmason, Ross Mason, ross, ross mason, cinema 4d redshift, cinema 4d speedart, rendering, cgi, cg, 3d, 3d render, c4d process, c4d tut, redshift, redshift render, cg guide, cinema 4d redshift tutorial, complete cg guide, bottle rendering, bottle render redshift, wine render c4d, uv unwrapping, lighting, texturing, post-production, modelling c4d, bottle render c4d redshift, how to bottle render c4d

Id: OTTk2N3d9uk

Length: 42min 7sec (2527 seconds)

Published: Sun May 22 2022