3D tutorial
Jack Daniel's Bottle

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Textures Continued...

Now the neck wrapper is a little more tricky. See the image on the left:
There's that lower portion which is transparent, so we'll need a transparency map here and will use the fast fesnel shader. The color map is simply mapped cylindrically with a width wrap amount of 1.

Surface settings.

Here are the surface settings. The transparency map is simply a copy of the color map for the neck wrapper with the writing removed and finally inverted. On the layer beneath it lies a gradient set to 100% (of course you can use "value" for that one...). Then the transparency map is layed on top of it with blending mode set to alpha (which removes the transparency in the white area of the texture). Add a fast fresnel shader on the Shaders Tab and leave the default values, but uncheck "transparency".
Even the neck wrapper needs a backside, while the backside of the labels is more or less white (and thus pretty easy to surface), the neck wrapper is mostly white but the black of the outside is shining through.

Change opacity.

Copy the surface settings of the neck wrapper to the surface of it's flipped counterpart. Now you only need to make one minor change: lower the color map's opacity to 47.5% and you're done.

Surfacing Glass And Air

First let's do the air, which is real simple:

Diffuse = 0%
Transparency = 100%
Refraction Index = 1.003
That's it!
The next one is a bit more of a challenge.

The main glass surface required some testrenders to tweak. Glass never is fully transparent. It always has a low level of diffusion and "tints" the light as it passes through. I went for a greenish base color and 5% diffusion. The reflection is 10% which serves as a starting value for the fast fresnel shader. This means that at 90° the glass will have a reflection level of only 10% but as the angle approaches 0° this value is gradually increased by the fast fresnel shader. This is one important detail of the "behaviour" of glass that I have seen frequently overlooked. Add the fast fresnel shader on the Shaders Tab and leave all settings at their default values except transparency. Set this one to 10%. (this leaves a transparency of 10% at 0°)
On the Advanced Tab enter 90% for Color Highlights and 10% for Color Filter. Color Highlights will tint the highlights and Color Filter will tint the light as it passes through the glass.
Another often overlooked fact about glass is that it's never completely smooth. So we'll use a bump map. As you can see above, I used a rather small scaled Turbulence texture with a low intensity of 3%.

Adding the writing

Now that we have the main glass surface finished, the writing is still missing. You'll need to select 4 groups of polys as shown in the image above (front - left - back - right) and assign surfaces to them. Name them so you will know which is which. Now simply copy the settings of the main glass surface we did just create and paste them to all of the 4 new surfaces. Next add a new texture to the bump channel and planar-map the custom bump map we created earlier on the Z-Axis for the front and back parts and on the X-Axis for the left and right parts. Change the Size X-Value for the backsided texture and the Z-Value for the lefthanded texture to negative. Be sure to have the blending mode set to additive and the texture laying above the Turbulence texture.

Surfacing The Whiskey

Time to fill her up.

The base color of the whiskey material is very important. Luckily I found the sweet spot pretty soon and without extensive testrendering (only 2-3 testrenders were needed, and you won't need none, cause I'm telling it to ya. Incredibly kind of me, ain't it? ;-)
Ok, here are the RGB values for the whiskey base color:

R = 243 / 0.95
G = 153 / 0.60
B = 062 / 0.24

Above you can see the details of the whiskey surface, including the Base Tab and the bump texture. Again we'll use Color Highlights and Color Filter, that's even more crucial when we render with Caustics turned on, because they should appear tinted orangeish by this glorious liquid. Set Color Highlights to 70% and Color Filter to 100%.
On the Shaders Tab add a fast fresnel shader and use the following settings:

Reflection = 70%
Specularity = 100%
Transparency = 20%

Of course you can also add air surfaces, but I didn't. Instead I made the whiskey a doublesided material. Now that the model is completely textured, the only things left to do is to fire up Layout, set up a backdrop and some lights, and hit F9.

Layout

The first to decide is what kind of Backdrop/Environment will be used. I chose the kitchen_probe HDR image because I liked the "mood" of the scene and because a bottle of Jack Daniel's would seem slightly misplaced inside the St. Peters Cathedral... So add an ImageWorld on the Backdrop panel and load kitchen_probe from your Lightwave\Images\HDR directory. (you'll have to load the kitchen_probe using the ImageEditor before that) Then I added my bottle and a box that had to serve as a table to the scene, placed my camera and adjusted the angle and lens until I liked it.

The following testrenders were made using the default spotlight without change and only to determine the "right" brightness and rotation settings for the kitchen_probe ImageWorld. To cut the render times, you can reduce the Ray Recursion Limit to say 4 and set the resolution to about 400x300. To do the testrenders before adding the objects would of course speed up the rendering even more but is not necessarily a good idea because you wouldn't be able to judge if the reflections are too bright or dim.
Here are the ImageWorld settings that worked best for me:

Heading = 80°
Brightness = 50%

I wanted to have the window to the left and slightly to the back, because in this location/area I would place my main light and so the caustics would be clearly visible, not hidden by the geometry. Using a Bank rotation on the camera adds drama to the scene. The camera lens was set relatively low at 21,3 mm (on a 35mm motion picture camera) to implie a sense of dynamics (higher lens settings tend to look "static"). I'm a big fan of low lens settings :-)

Lighting

Now let's set up the lights. Set Ambient Intensity to 0%. The light colors should reflect the colors found in the backdrop to achieve a smooth blend between the objects and the backdrop. I chose to simulate this manually, but you can get Overcaster by Eki Halkka (which I highly recommend anyway) to make this task even simpler and use "Ambimage". Ambimage is even able to mimic "Backdrop Only" Radiosity settings... Back to the point: Here are the Light settings in detail:

Some more words on the Render Options settings and we're done: Of course you should enable Raytrace Reflections and Raytrace Refractions, getting the right amount of the Ray Recursion Limit is more difficult; to low and the glass won't look right, too high and your render times go through the roof. I found my sweet spot at 6. (hmm, the joy of six, I guess I should retry 7). On the Global Illumination panel enable

Caustics and start with an Accuracy of 6,000 (the max setting is 10,000) and an Intensity of 50%. You can play with the values until you achieve a look you like and gain some feeling for them.

One more thing:
Depth Of Field is like instant realism. I highly recommend using it, be it as the standard DOF or the newly integrated Digital Confusion. I used DC and added an empty as an AutoFocus controller.
That's it, we're through. I hope you had some fun reading this tutorial and even more importantly learned something new. If you want to comment on this tute, feel free to drop me a mail.
And remember:

"mesh" is only one letter away from "mess"

3D tutorial Jack Daniel's Bottle