8 oz. glass Coke bottle and cap

[R Reynolds]

Everything except for the bubbles.

[Eric2575]

I guess, by now, some members may know that I'm a stickler for details - just look at my Saleen car WIP for months and months I love your bottle, but the sharp contrast between the bottle cap and the wood base is buggin me. The wood is very blurry and the cap is very sharply defined.

[phnxpyre]

Awesome work on the bottle, great improvements.

 

i agree with eric on his comments about the bottle cap with the wood contrast. I also want to add that it doesn't really look like a solid bottle cap....because it is kind of bent.-----> the bend-e-ness of the cap gives the illusion of it being made out of paper or something bendable. I think you make it just a flat bottle cap. But if you raise it off the wood a little bit, it might look better.

 

Good stuff

the bottle is perfect.....very real looking.

[R Reynolds]

but the sharp contrast between the bottle cap and the wood base is buggin me

Yeah it bugs me too. It's caused by the relatively lo-res 1380 X 638 decal that makes up most of the plywood texture. I made the original decal about 13 years ago using my then state-of-the-art, 640 x 480, digital camera. The contractor building the neighbour's house left a plywood sheet in a convenient location so I grabbed three images and spliced them together. I tried to blend in some finer detail using a procedural material but the knots are the most obviously blurry details. Still I sort of prefer it to the perfect, blemish free wood surfaces you get with typical procedurals. (I'd pay real money for a wood material with controllable knots). I hope some day to use my newer 21st century digital camera to make a higher res decal; assuming someone leaves out another 4X8 sheet.

 

doesn't really look like a solid bottle cap....because it is kind of bent

Gee, I worked long and hard on that bent pose. Perhaps you're used to twist off bottles caps. There was a time during the last century when you couldn't remove a bottle cap without severly distorting it's shape while using a metal tool called a bottle opener. Since everything in my CG world lives in an early 1950's time frame I felt the bent cap was appropriate.

[heyvern]

Uh...

 

I... uh... sometimes go to my local Home Depot or similar store with my digital camera and shoot wood...

 

...that sounds dirty doesn't it?

 

Vernon "!" Zehr

[oakchas]

You take pictures of wood?

 

R Reynolds used a chrch key?

 

Fogies!

 

Vern, I'm surprised the BORG (Big Orange Retail Giant aka Home Despot) would allow you to take pix of anything in their store.... Afraid you'll steal all their marketing idears and overthrow them. Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.

 

oh and Rodger, the contrtast doesn't bother me as much as the fact that there aren't enough crimps in the cap. The bottle is beautiful.. but the liquid is "flat" somehow... not lacking bubbles flat... maybe it needs caustics? But then, maybe it's just been out in the hot sun too long.

[phnxpyre]

Reynolds: ahhhhhh i see. i am used to twist off caps.

thanks for clearing that up. And that pose does look sweet (the bent bottle cap)!!!!!!!!!!

 

[R Reynolds]

the fact that there aren't enough crimps in the cap

I wondered if someone was going to pick up on that. Since it's unlikely this prop will ever occupy this much screen space, I increased my personal tolerance to dimensional accuracy and cheated by reducing the crimp count from the standard 21 to 20 to ease the copy/paste/rotate process.

...maybe it needs caustics?

Certainly that would help with the shadows but at this time I'm not ready for the render hit. As it was, this one took 23 hrs. No doubt about it, transparency is expensive.

maybe it's just been out in the hot sun too long

I actually figured out how to model bubbles that rendered correctly but I didn't use them since that's the way this prop (and for that matter 99% of my props) will eventually be used.

sometimes go to my local Home Depot or similar store with my digital camera and shoot wood

That's not a bad idea Vern! Do you go when it's busy so the staff is so over-worked that they don't notice you or early in the morning when the staff isn't awake?

R Reynolds used a church key?...Fogies!

Absolutely. I've also used a rotary dial phone; a slide rule; recorded music (in analog!) on reels of tape that had to be manually threaded and have actually had to get out of my chair and cross the room to change the television channels. Oh gawd, it was sheer torture.

[ddustin]

the fact that there aren't enough crimps in the cap

I wondered if someone was going to pick up on that. Since it's unlikely this prop will ever occupy this much screen space, I increased my personal tolerance to dimensional accuracy and cheated by reducing the crimp count from the standard 21 to 20 to ease the copy/paste/rotate process.

...maybe it needs caustics?

Certainly that would help with the shadows but at this time I'm not ready for the render hit. As it was, this one took 23 hrs. No doubt about it, transparency is expensive.

maybe it's just been out in the hot sun too long

I actually figured out how to model bubbles that rendered correctly but I didn't use them since that's the way this prop (and for that matter 99% of my props) will eventually be used.

sometimes go to my local Home Depot or similar store with my digital camera and shoot wood

That's not a bad idea Vern! Do you go when it's busy so the staff is so over-worked that they don't notice you or early in the morning when the staff isn't awake?

R Reynolds used a church key?...Fogies!

Absolutely. I've also used a rotary dial phone; a slide rule; recorded music (in analog!) on reels of tape that had to be manually threaded and have actually had to get out of my chair and cross the room to change the television channels. Oh gawd, it was sheer torture.

 

Roger,

Here is a wood image.

I have more.

You could make a material out of it with bitmap plus.

 

Have you ever played PONG?? huh....

David

[Nosferatu]

Rodger,

 

Regarding the cap, I can't help but think that a real cap would have a sharper bend angle because of the way an opener leverages itself against the middle of the cap. Yours tends to curve up at a gradual slope.

 

The bottle looks absolutely awesome. Just wondering, how many passes?

 

Nos

[R Reynolds]

Here is a wood image.

Thanks David.

Have you ever played PONG??

Not really. Those old scrolling video/arcade games didn't float my boat. Then Castle Wolfenstein was released!

...how many passes?

Five passes with 52 skylights with shadows. Probably a waste of clock cycles since the bottle's shadow is not that complex but that's my "showcase" lighting setup.

...I can't help but think that a real cap would have a sharper bend angle...

More like this?

[oakchas]

of the two, i prefer the old bend.

 

Back to the crimps. Since no one in the world (besides yourself) has ACTUALLY counted the requisite number of crimps, why not broaden them so that they almost touch?

 

It would look more correct as they wouldn't be spaced so far apart.

 

But after all it's only a bottletop... it ain't no pianey.

 

And here's an example of what I mean... (I realize this is NOT an actual bottle cap... but the crimping is what we expect to see (wavy at the bottom of the crimp, not so far separated) and therefore "good" signage.

 

[attachmentid=12454]

[Nosferatu]

Yes, I think the new cap would look more realistic in the scene. I wish I had a bottle to open so I could test.

 

Nos

[R Reynolds]

After some tweaking; how 'bout this?

[NancyGormezano]

Cap looks good..But somehow I'm recalling that the old caps were silver colored. Perhaps I'm way older than you, with a badder memory. Now what was I saying? - Oh yes - yours looks too white to me - and I would also expect to see some distress marks on the silvery finish, unless of course this is a bottle in mint condition - hot off the assembly.

[R Reynolds]

The back story is the drinker bought the bottle out of the vending machine just before leaving for the work site and stored it in his tool box. So the top probably didn't have that much time to get blemished but I will probably tilt it's colour closer to a cream. The attached image was my prototype.

[heyvern]

Hello kids!

 

Proffessor "OCD" here...

 

Found this web site...

 

http://www.vintagedepotdirect.com/old-bottlecaps.html

 

Roger,

 

I have done shapes like this that have "ridges" that taper to nothing. I just extrude some extra splines and select every other CP on the bottom ring and scale out, perfect "blend" to the "round" top.

 

In this case... maybe scale an extra ridge spline just a tiny bit near the top.

 

-----------

 

What jumps out to me is the... mechanical... look of the ridges. Very "boxy" where they join at the top.

 

Well, that's all from the man who models the sub atomic structure of a door hinge that won't be in shot to get it "just right".

 

 

Vernon "!" Zehr

[robcat2075]

"minimum contents 6 fluid ozs."

 

 

that is truly from a bygone era in which people had a "sip" of coke and not a bucket.

 

 

Maybe you should add the thin people from "American Gothic" in the background just to establish that human beings once flourished in that form.

[R Reynolds]

Original image at thread start has been updated with the bottle cap revised to reflect the various suggestions.

 

Thanks for the input.

[oakchas]

Yes Rodger!

 

I think you've nailed it!

 

Very good.

 

Sorry for the nit picks... It just looked too angular.

[rossk]

Wow! That looks really good.

Did you use a glass material for the bottle and then apply dirt/smudge decals on top?

 

Oh, also a question-- With the cloudcover in the sky (as the background image shows) would the shadows' edges have a bit of extra softeness?

[R Reynolds]

Sorry for the nit picks...

No need for apologies. If I didn't want suggestions, I wouldn't have posted.

 

Did you use a glass material for the bottle and then apply dirt/smudge decals on top?

The bottle group has two materials; the first for the optical properties and the second (shown below at 100%) is applied as a bump material to add texture.

 

With the cloudcover in the sky (as the background image shows) would the shadows' edges have a bit of extra softeness

It only looks cloudy from this camera angle. As you can see in the entire sky decal below, it's a partly cloudy day and the sun is unobscured. It's always a mild and sunny day in my CG world.

[DanCBradbury]

One thing i noticed is that there are no shadows being emitted from the sky light rig that you have. Which would give the picture a much realer feel and look.

 

you should try using the recently developed HRDI/LDRI method for your project. I think that would look killer. High Dyanamic Range Imagery