This tutorial demonstrates ways to make a glass, its materials and the content inside the glass. I made the model in c4d r9, but It can be done with lower versions (just to try it, I got a
very similar result with cinema ce6).
And yes…. Sorry about my bad English. I think you’ll understand.
It consists of three parts: Making the glass, making the bottle, and making the scene.
You can find assorted files and finished scene
here
PART 1 - MODELLING THE GLASS
You can use blueprints for this, but they are not necessary. I didn’t use them. So, go to Objects/Spline Object. This will create a blank spline. While holding CTRL, draw one half of the glass. You should have in mind the following:
When you are tracing the upper part of the glass (the hollow part) distance between inner and outer part of the spline must be so small, that it’s nearly invisible when you zoom out.
The “leg” of the glass must be filled.
Type of the spline MUST be Linear.
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Here’s what i got:
(i made a mistake in this pic. In the lower part of the glass, each point needs a partner. I drew them on the pic)
When you are done tracing the glass, insert a LatheNURBS object. Place the spline in it. Now you have the glass. For more “smoothity” insert a HyperNURBS object. Place the LatheNURBS in it. Voila!
We are now done with part one.
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PART 1.2 – ADDING A MATERIAL TO THE GLASS
This is the first tricky part with this model. You have to get it right if you want your glass to look…. Well, glassy!
Create a new material. Name it…….. hm…… I don’t know…… glass, maybe? Double click it.
Color.
The colour channel of the glass must be pure white (R 255, G 255, B255) and brightness 100%.
Diffusion.
I use diffusion if I want to make dirt and such. But, it can also represent the light dissipation. There is almost no dissipation on glass, so set the brightness to 19% (I said almost, didn’t I ?). Also, uncheck the Influence Specular checkbox.
Transparency.
Now, this is tricky. We want the glass to be transparent, right? If we only put the transparency brightness to 100% it will become invisible. Ok, let’s add some refraction. Type in 1.52. if you render the scene, you won’t be satisfied. Hmmm… what should we do? Ah, lets add a shader! Choose Fresnel as a shader. Click the Fresnel image to edit it. Middle of the gradient should be pure white. There should also be some pale grey tones on the edges.
Reflection.
If we take the default reflection, it will equally reflect everything on the whole glass surface. We want a subtle reflection. To do that, we need our good old friend Mr. Fresnel. Again, click the image to edit it. One end of the gradient should be dark gray, the other pure black.
Specular.
This channel differs in the newest versions of C4D. If you own an older version of Cinema 4D, don’t worry, I’ll explain what to do with them too.
- old versions (under 7). Since there is no inner width and fallof, type this:
Height 650
Width 0
- versions (above 7).
Height 100
Width 12
Falloff 0
Inner width 25
Illumination. (this channel does not exist in the older versions. If you own one, don’t worry, this isn’t very important)
Since the default shader is Phong, it puts highlights on both sides of the glass. We don’t want that. So change it to Blinn.
Drag the material onto the glass. If you did it all right, you will be satisfied with the result:
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That completes the second part.
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PART 1.3 – MAKING LIQUID INSIDE THE GLASS
This part is the easiest. It only involves editing already made stuff.
To make the shape of liquid, we are going to copy lower polygons of the hollow part. Since our glass is made of two layers, inner and outer, we are going to select only the outer layer. To make sure you do that right, in the Selection tool active object choose only select visible elements. Now, using common sense, select polygons that would represent the liquid. Go to Functions/Split. Select the splitted object and drag it out. Notice that our wine has no top (lid?!). We can add the top in 2 ways. First is for users of the newer versions and the second one for older versions.
1. Select the splitted object. Go to polygon selection. Choose a poly and press CTRL + a.
This will select all polys. Now go to Structure / close polygon hole. Move the mouse on top of the hole. If nothing happens, try to move your cursor to an edge. Close the hole by clicking. Done! Now we have a finished liquid object.
2. (old versions) Select all vertexes around the hole (only the topmost ones, those that make a circle). Press B. Bridge the surface carefully.
Scale the new part a bit (scale it so it’s a bit smaller than the actual glass).
Place it inside the glass.
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PART 1.4 – MAKING LIQUID MATERIAL
To make a wine material, we are going to edit the glass material. First copy and paste it. Double click the copied material. Edit only what is mentioned here:
Transparency.
Change the transparency colour to dark red (burgundy). It will instantly decrease the transparency (which is what we want). Wine isn’t as reflective as glass, so turn it down a bit. I don’t want to give you the exact parameters, because then you can make it as you like.
DONE!
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PART 1.5 – MAKING THE ENVIRONMENT
Insert 3 planes to the scene and position them as shown:
(this is a render, don't worry if your project doesn't look like this yet)
Insert a light. Default omni will do nicely. Go to the properties of the light you just made. For the shadow type, choose Soft shadow. No need for anything else.
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Position the whole scene as shown in the above picture.
Now, go to Render settings. Change antialiazing to best (r9) or all (CE6). We don’t want anything spectacular, so save the changes and render. WOW!!!
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Now, for the second part of the tutorial. Making the bottle.
Our current scene is artistic and nice, but is still kind of empty. Thus, we will add a bottle of wine to it. Process of making the bottle is pretty straight forward, and is exactly like making the glass. This is an advantage of lathe. You can make various different shapes using the EXACT same techniques.
So, let’s start of by cleaning up our scene.
Delete everything in the scene except the glass model (uncluding the liquid) and lights. You can hide your model, but you don’t need to, and it’s better not to, because you will have better view of the proportions.
Find a reference for your wine bottle. I used this one:
Now, what is good about this reference is that it is in high res. That way, we can use the reference as a texture when we make the label later. This image was much bigger than you see it, but I scaled it down to fit the page. You won’t need a bigger picture anyway.
Now, place this picture as your viewport background. Make another spline object and draw out the inner and outer edge of the bottle, as you did with the glass. Trace just one half of the bottle. MAKE SURE YOU MAKE THE SPOUT! The bottle must be open. We will make it all out of a single piece and then separate parts like the label and the cork. Make sure the spline type is set to ‘Linear’.
Once you have drawn it out, make a lathe object and put your spline in it. If it is not showing like it should, move the spline to the ordinate (y axis) with the middle vertices on 0 value of y axis. Now you have a block. This is the basic shape of the bottle. On our reference, the cork is covered with foil, but since there is already some wine in our glass, the whole scene will seem illogical. That is why we traced out edges of the spout. We don’t need a reference for the cork, since it is very simple. Make another spline object and draw out outer edge of the cork. Remember, only draw one half of it.
Cork Profile:
Lathe Bottle:
Make a new lathe object and put the cork in it J.
Bottle with cork:
Now we need to add a label to it. Make the bottle lathe object editable and select the label polys. This don’t need to be exact, but because we will use the texture for it from the reference, try to match the selection as close as possible. You can even select loops of vertices and adjust them to the label on the ref. Right click your selection and choose split. Rename the newly created object to ‘Label’.
Selected polys:
Scale it just a tiny, tiny bit and extrude it (also a TINY bit, because the label doesn’t have much thickness, but it still has some). Choose ‘Make caps’.
We also need some liquid in the bottle, and we’ll make it exactly as we did with the glass. Select one third of the bottle’s polys (where the vine should be. Don’t forget to select the bottom!). Split it, cover the top using ‘Close polygon hole ’ tool, and scale it don’t do it too much, just a little.
Place the bottle and cork into new HyperNURBS objects. The label should be as sharp as possible, so you don’t need to put it into a HyperNURBS, phong tag will be enough. Don’t put liquid in the hyper nurbs, as it will mess it up.
Oops! Looks like something is wrong with our cork. Hyper nurbs made a hole in the middle of it. To fix this, select all middle vertices of the cork on the top of it (the center) and weld them together. Done!
That is it for the modelling. Now to make the mats.
PART 2.2 MAKING THE BOTTLE MATERIAL
Our main bottle material will rely on the old glass material that we made. Of course, we are going to make some adjustments, to make it green and dull.
Copy the Glass material and name it bottle.glass. Double click it, and set it up as shown:
Colour:
Diffusion:
Transparency:
Click the Fresnel preview box and set it up like so:
Reflection:
And to make the label texture… Make a new mat and name it label.tex. Use a photo editing program and crop the label from our reference. Save it as a new file.
In the colour channel, click the button next to ‘Texture’, the button is labelled with 3 dots. Locate your label texture.
Drag the material to the label and change projection from UVW mapping to Cylindrical.
Give it these coordinates: Position Y-63. Don’t change anything here. Go to ‘Tag’. Length X: 50; Length Y: 117 and tiles X: 2.
For the cork texture we are going to use a simple noise texture. Create a new material and name it, hmmm, cork. Press the little triangle button in the colour channel and locate ‘Noise’. Click the preview box, and you’ll see two little boxes. Don’t move them.
The first’s colour should be: 177, 128, 78.
Second’s: 124, 82, 61.
Also, change the U and V frequency to 5.
Drag the material onto the cork.
Now that that is done, we are going to make a new scene. First, adjust the bottle size so that it is proportioned correctly to the glass. Move the bottle away from the glass a little.
We need a table. We can choose from two types of tables: Round and cubic. Both are easy to create, but they will not give us the same result. So, let’s review our project:
We have a lot of glass, which means we need reflections to make it visible and realistic. So, we need an environment that can encompass our models well, without holes. If we use a round table, we won’t be able to place walls without having a gap between the table and walls. That will result an unrealistic render. So, cubic table it is!
Make a box (size doesn’t really matter, make it as big as possible) and place it so that the top of it touches the bottom of the bottle and the glass. Make two planes and position them orthogonally, as two walls. Position your camera and make a render!
