Ignore that coaster, lol!

My latest WIP, how to simulate cocktail liquid better ???

Suggestion and ideas appreciated, im trying to make it look kind of foggy and more interesting then this, some kind of gradient would be good too...

Thanks

good scene. I think it's three problems: 1. lighting. blur the shadows a bit and reduce them from the skylab (maybe about 60%). 2. the glass. it's good, but it needs a bit more transparency and perhaps not as much refraction/reflection. 3. give a bit more transparency and ambience to the liquid. sorry, i just put you up to a two week render. drac

Well I was going to share with you an interesting fogged glass texture I had captured a long time ago but it seems it is not accepting images right now. Anyway, assuming that the scene is a hot day, do what the drac says and you can take it a step further by selecting the glass, duplicate it and without moving it, make glass number two .01 bryce units bigger on all dimensions, set this as your foggy glass texture. Now set glass #2 as positive and group it, but not glass#1, with some negative elongated spheres. The spheres should be about the size as a finger/thumb print would be in your image, depending on the glass's size. THEN find a b&w picture of a full-on fingerprint on google image search and import it into the terrain editor, apply it to a symetrical lattice, make sure that it is set to neutral, then place it in the middle of an elongated sphere, but on the surface of the side of glass #1. Apply your fogged glass texture to this. If it worked, and I did this a long LONG time ago, then you will have a frosty glass with a condensation fingerprint(s) on the side. Sorry I couldn't help you out with any images, but something is whack with the image attach.

First of all, there is no reflection on the glass and transparency is the all the way up to 100% (liquid is the same, just different color), cannot make it more transparent then that, lol, second, i was more thinking foggy liquid, not foggy glass, dunno, is the refraction the key??? I'll try that tonite, i chose regular glass texture from bryce presets (133 refraction, i think)...

Aye, some of the realism you'er looking for is merely in the settings. For example, can you see the black null-refractions in your glass? Especially at the top and near the base? These are caused by the Ray Depth and TIR limits being set too low for the rays to escape the glass itself, so they come up as black pixels, or null-refractions (I made that one up!) Try turning the TIR and Ray Depth up past 10, it will take care of that problem. And on to something more specific. The stock, Standard Glass preset should be at 152 on it's refraction index. The liquid should be well below that, below 133 even, as it's a cocktail, not water. Regardless, make sure your drink material and your glass material are as different as possible... Perhaps try a bubbly material for your drink? Another small thing : the ambience on your orange slice. Notice how you can't even see the orange rind in the shadows? Turn it's ambience up a bit, and make sure your Ambient dot is set to match the texture in the Color area, but not lower down... Make any sense? I'll give you a screenshot if it doesn't... Just some tips and ideas, I think it's a great start, and I love the ice-cubes!

You probably have this set up on the standard bryce infinite plane with nothing else around it. If it reflects the things behind your perspective/camera what are you going to see? From this angle you should see the chair and lap of the person doing the drinking. You need to either build props or load pictures to give the glass something to reflect. Since it's an umbrella drink you could get a beach picture and put it behind the camera to reflect off the glass. Search the threads for the word hdri. These are image spheres. They help a lot when doing glass pictures.

Heres a plain bryce cyllinder, standard glass, default beyce scene, default plain. Rendered at premium settings true ambience 64 rays, boring...! The glass almost disappears.

Same cullinder, standard glass, default bryce scene with the same haze, fog, etc that comes with the default scene. Deleted the ground plane. created a sphere with a hdri called kinski mapped to it. turned off shadows. Set ambience and diffusion at 80 Expanded the sphere to enclose the cyllinder and camera. Turned sunlight off. Same premium render settings and same material.

Well, this discussion went a little too deep for me at the time I read it (about 10 mins before my bedtime), but I still managed to come up with a related question: Given that the theme of this thread is "make liquid look more realistic" (and given that we're talking about close-ups here), is there any way to simulate the meniscus? My only idea so far is to use some booleans: one well-flattened sphere (to create the initial curve), grouped with a "negatived" a cylinder (carefully positioned) negatived against the flattened sphere (to create a flat bottom surface), both booleaned negative against the top of the liquid. errm.. I hope that made sense. I'm 2 mins from bed-time, and mind is running liquidly...

Well, this discussion went a little too deep for me at the time I read it (about 10 mins before my bedtime), but I still managed to come up with a related question:

Given that the theme of this thread is "make liquid look more realistic" (and given that we're talking about close-ups here), is there any way to simulate the meniscus? My only idea so far is to use some booleans: one well-flattened sphere (to create the initial curve), grouped with a "negatived" a cylinder (carefully positioned) negatived against the flattened sphere (to create a flat bottom surface), both booleaned negative against the top of the liquid.

errm.. I hope that made sense. I'm 2 mins from bed-time, and mind is running liquidly...
Oops - didn't meant to post twice; I'm not sure how that happened! (I didn't intend to post once, til I'd re-read what I'd written, but it happpened anyway - all by itself, or so it semed - I must have hit some key by mistake):-)) Cheers, Diolma

Message edited on: 07/22/2004 17:49

One can easily simulate a meniscus with a lens (one positive sphere cut by one intersect sphere)... Proper placement is difficult, though, in Bryce, and should be done in the modeler where it will be more accurate.