Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted September 9, 2019 Advanced Member Share Posted September 9, 2019 (edited) This is more of a proof of concept rather than a finished work at this point. The raised, gilt pattern on the glass was painted using a mouse so that made it pretty damn clumsy to execute; I don't even have so much as a Bamboo tablet right now. I'm waiting to buy a Cintique Pro soon so this will have to do. The glass stopper needs badly to be reworked. Lots of tweaks and experiments to come on photon maps and caustics. But the main thing for this weekend was to simply pull this off to this extent so I'm happy with that. And again, the Autopo produces impeccable meshes now, particularly in tandem with the Symmetry. I'd hate to have to hand retopo the Boolean hollowed interior of this vessel with a hand retopo. Edited September 9, 2019 by L'Ancien Regime 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted September 10, 2019 Author Advanced Member Share Posted September 10, 2019 (edited) So I reworked the bottle stopper and in doing so I discovered that a Normal Map is essential to rendering glass. By reworking it's displacement entirely with the normal map in ppp, it just popped, crystalline clear, the way it was supposed to be, not murky or sandblasted as it initially appeared. To do that with the rest of the bottle I'll have to redo the gold pattern on it using a normal map instead of just a painted displacement identical to the painted gold alpha basically. Even with just a mouse it should be much better second time round. I didn't have time for that tonight but I did have time to apply a simple normal map to the .obj slab of amber liquid in the crystal flask. That and removing some base color blue that was tucked away in the liquid shader's base color made it look a lot more like some kind of perfume and not yesterday's coffee in your secretary's styrofoam cup. Edited September 10, 2019 by L'Ancien Regime 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted September 18, 2019 Author Advanced Member Share Posted September 18, 2019 Glass poses so many problems. I'm going to have to figure out caustics... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted September 18, 2019 Author Advanced Member Share Posted September 18, 2019 (edited) The bottle really needed to be twisted more. The wine is sort of meh at this point.[ Edited September 18, 2019 by L'Ancien Regime Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted September 18, 2019 Author Advanced Member Share Posted September 18, 2019 (edited) Am I ever happy; just getting caustics in my glass renders ended up being a lot easier than I expected though I'm sure with work and experimentation I can get better caustics examples than this. But I'll take this for now and be happy with it. I've always loved computer graphics renders of fine glass work, like high end magazine ads for perfume bottles, and now the way is open to have a hell of a lot of fun in the immediate future. And you know, adding caustics and making the carafe, it's stopper and the wine photon targets seems to have done something to it all. The glass has an extra smoothness to it, the wine has a more real quality to it. I suspect adding more photons to the mix will give a purer caustic casting of red light onto the ground than it has now with its blotches of white in there. Edited September 18, 2019 by L'Ancien Regime 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted September 18, 2019 Author Advanced Member Share Posted September 18, 2019 (edited) And I'm finding that in objects like this, it's not even worth your while to retopo them (AUTOPO or manually) and then extract maps. Just switch them over from voxel to surface mode, do an automatic poly reduction on export and render them as is. After all your render engine is going to take whatever you throw at it, be it NURBS, BREP or SubD polygons with maps and it's going to just winnow them down to mini triangle polys in their hundreds of thousands anyway, so why even bother with all the extra procedures if you're not working with something that requires a lot of maps? This just takes 15 minutes to create, set up, and render. And it's always a good idea to shrink your liquid object a tiny bit so there won't be any artifacts from an intersection between the transparent container and it's liquid contacts that will produce unpleasant artifacts in the render. eg. tumbler's scale; .01 whiskey object scale; .0098 Edited September 18, 2019 by L'Ancien Regime Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted September 19, 2019 Author Advanced Member Share Posted September 19, 2019 (edited) So it only seemed logical to wind up the gilt glass bottle with its own caustic light render. I did it in 4K and it's got some nasty artifacts. It's a pretty rough and ready example but the caustics turned out pretty nice. Once I get a Cintique in a few months I'll completely redo it properly. One word of advice to all of you who want to try your own caustics; you can set up all the lights you need and everything looks great and then you plug in the photon target glass or liquid and son of a gun it all goes incandescent on you like a magnesium fire, especially the fluid. The answer isn't to play with your direct light settings or ambient light settings. And it isn't your photon count. It's the energy level of your refractive light. And that's not the refractive index of the light take note. It's the refractive light. If your liquid or the base of your glass container is blindingly incandescent then look into your glass or translucent liquid material and crank down your Refraction Energy or Refraction Intensity or whatever to one fifth or even one twentieth of the stock setting. Edited September 19, 2019 by L'Ancien Regime 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted September 19, 2019 Author Advanced Member Share Posted September 19, 2019 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted September 21, 2019 Author Advanced Member Share Posted September 21, 2019 (edited) You know if we're going to continue, and make some drinkies, we're definitely going to need some ice, though don't worry. I won't be committing the blasphemy of adding ice to perfectly good scotch. Move Tool and Scrape Tool with a few curvilinear cuts too. Got to boolean some bubbles in there. By the way, do you know what 3D Coat needs? A surface mode plane, a 2D mesh with some various algorithmic distortion tools so you can make boolean cuts to fragment objects, like the crack in that ice cube. Edited September 21, 2019 by L'Ancien Regime Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted September 21, 2019 Author Advanced Member Share Posted September 21, 2019 (edited) So I tried using boolean subract to put bubbles in my ice cube. Nothing doing. I tried tweaking the materials and photon sampling and nothing doing; it wants to make the bubbles into wormholes of darkness rather than shimmering flecks fo silvery light. Those holes look like they're on the surface but in fact they're deeply embedded in the ice cube. Back to the drawing board on that one. And even that guy in the C4D video above didn't come close to getting realistic bubbles in his cubes, as good as they are. Edited September 21, 2019 by L'Ancien Regime Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted September 21, 2019 Author Advanced Member Share Posted September 21, 2019 Gleb Alexandrov to the rescue. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted September 22, 2019 Author Advanced Member Share Posted September 22, 2019 (edited) Aha, so I just solved the problem of ugly black worm hole bubbles in ice. The problem was being caused because those bubbles were being turned into holes in the ice cube using boolean subtract thus creating a one way Normal surface that was facing inwards only. They weren't reflecting light out like real bubbles in ice would thus they were appearing as nasty black holes. What to do? Instead of a boolean subtract, make them into beads of glass just sitting in the ice cube with no boolean subtract at all. Nobody is going to go in there and make the micro measurement that it's a glass IOR and not an ice IOR... I'll try it with ice IOR beads instead of glass... Now I've got to figure out a more effective way to distribute those masses of little elongated bubbles in more realistic configurations, procedurally. The thing is, the large numbers of bubbles/beads doesn't seem to affect the render time one bit so you could in principle go crazy and totally emulate those photos from nature. I think this is a much better solution than making the surface of the ice frosty/rough the way the Blender and C4D tutorials do it. Ice cubes are going to be in a drink or melting a bit like when they're in an ice bucket so in all likelihood they're going to not be frosty/rough, but rather wet and smooth as can be. So then you're going to have to find other means of giving them reflective inner architecture or topology to make them look substantial and not just perfectly transparent nullities. Masses of ice bubbles and rough inner crack networks added to a fairly uneven surface topology is the way to go. Edited September 22, 2019 by L'Ancien Regime Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted September 22, 2019 Author Advanced Member Share Posted September 22, 2019 (edited) Not quite the bubble generation I wanted; I couldn't find the tutorial...yet, but I know it's out there. I was looking at it just a couple days ago. It's a more scientific approach to the bubble generation in ice and as we know; sine scientica ars est nihil. This is what I came up with. Somehow the first renders were mushy looking; the diffuse surface roughness had somehow gotten jacked up to .789. Edited September 22, 2019 by L'Ancien Regime Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted September 22, 2019 Author Advanced Member Share Posted September 22, 2019 (edited) The final big render of the night Edited September 22, 2019 by L'Ancien Regime Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member Dmitry Bedrik Posted September 22, 2019 Advanced Member Share Posted September 22, 2019 It is easier and more beautiful to do either with the placement of bubbles manually or with a simulation of particles. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted September 22, 2019 Author Advanced Member Share Posted September 22, 2019 (edited) 3 hours ago, Dmitry Bedrik said: It is easier and more beautiful to do either with the placement of bubbles manually or with a simulation of particles. The bubbles aren't just random. They're a pattern so that calls for proceduralism of some variety, the kind you can do in Houdini or C4D or Bifrost in Maya. There's a tutorial I found that may do exactly the trick. https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/building-fx-tools-houdini-2202 What I've done so far is some really clumsy and simple proceduralism at the lowest level, but this tutorial shows the true route to attain these kinds of patterns. Though to be specific neither what I did or what this tutorial does involves particle simulation. Rather it's about scattering points over a grid or a line and then assigning some object to them, like an elongated sphere/bubble. It also shows how to make bundles or skeins of lines and distribute them according to your set parameters to form the desired pattern that you can observe examining ice in its various forms. Apparently you can produce real ice without bubbles at all if you boil the water before you freeze it to remove air from it. https://vimeo.com/116797081 Edited September 22, 2019 by L'Ancien Regime Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted September 23, 2019 Author Advanced Member Share Posted September 23, 2019 $45 USD for a few ice textures? Jeez all you need is to take some time to learn about it... https://cgterminal.com/2014/08/12/cinema-4d-ice-machine-rig/ There's nothing there you couldn't do with a decent render engine and a pleasant weekend of experimentation... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member Dmitry Bedrik Posted September 23, 2019 Advanced Member Share Posted September 23, 2019 17 hours ago, L'Ancien Regime said: The bubbles aren't just random. They're a pattern so that calls for proceduralism of some variety, the kind you can do in Houdini or C4D or Bifrost in Maya. There's a tutorial I found that may do exactly the trick. A free blender is enough for this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted September 26, 2019 Author Advanced Member Share Posted September 26, 2019 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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