We will create a whisky bottle in several parts. This first part deals with setting the scene up. We will use an endless background, a glow panel, a point light, a reflected background and a camera.
The Bottle
The bottle is a lathed profile with a little cheating. We are going to include the level of the liquid in the lathed profile. Of course, this is not physically correct, but works well and helps simplify the process.
The lathe profile
Detail of the level of the liquid
The Bottle lathe
The material of the bottle is part of the cheat, and it must work both as glass and as liquid. The texture is below.
The texture for the whisky bottle. Click the image for a full-size view
A render at this moment will probably be almost entirely black.
We need to create ambientation.
Put a camera in the scene
From a front view, click on the plus menu (upper right corner of the modeling window) and select Create Camera from View.
Resize the camera window and move the view until the bottle looks good.
The camera view for this project
Replacing the light
Let us set the default directional light to construction and add a point light above and to the front of the bottle, a little to the left.
The default directional light set to construction
When set to construction, the directional light lights our modeling sessions but will not appear in the final render.
The point light in place
The Endless Background
The endless background solves much of the problem of creating a scene. it provides both a ground and a background for projects that are only one or a few objects.
The model is really simple. An extruded path.
The Endless Backdrop
The texture is a reflective one with no specularity and a very blurry reflection.
The Endless Backdrop texture. Click for the full-size image
A test render should give us something like this:
Lathed bottle and endless background
The Glow Panel
The glow panel is simply a rectangle placed off-camera to the left of the bottle.
The Glow Panel position
The glow panel texture is a glowing texture with a soft-edged stencil map.
Stencil map for the glow panel
The glow panel texture. Click on image for full-size.
The bottle with the glow panel in place
The reflected background
We need a reflected background to complete the scene. We will use a simple Horizon Background.
The Horizon Background
The background applied as a reflected environment
Our bottle should look like this.
The bottle at the end of stage 1
