Wine and Plums, al fresco

[Uraboz]

I wanted to experiment with shading and environments in Cycles, so I set out to do this simple scene.

The hardest part was getting the tablecloth to “wrinkle” the way I wanted to, and getting the bump map to kind of work, given that I was using a pretty low res texture. There’s still a bit of an ugly gap between the table and the tablecloth that I couldn’t figure out how to get rid off without having the tablecloth fly away into space in the animation.

The glass beaker was pretty easy to do, but I did some experimentation with roughness and refractive index. The wine took a bit more work, but I ended up going with a principled BSDF shader with a lot of transmission, and added an absortion node to compensate for light loss inside. The refractive index ended up being a bit higher than that of water.

Surprisingly, the plums were very easy to do. I know they are not the very best plums one can achieve with Blender, but I’m proud with how they turned out.

There’s also a bit of compositing, in the form of RGB Curves to get a slightly more film-ish look, and some fog glare to get soften hot spots.

I think I’m ready to start on the chess set now. Wish me luck!

EDIT: I forgot! The HDRI is from here: https://hdrihaven.com/hdri/?c=outdoor&h=spruit_sunrise

[FedPete]

Wow, I find this impressive, because it’s Eevee! I can imagine that you’ve spend a lot of work in this.
I find Eevee (extremely) difficult in aspects of render quality. In my latest project I went from Eevee to Cycle, to Eevee then ending up on Cycles. Just because of the aspects you mentioned in your forum issue.
I would like to know more.

The table cloth can be generated using phisics and the cloth simulator. But your approach is very convincing. So you did a very good job. And I like your composition very much. It’s pleasant to look at. Well done!

[Uraboz]

Hey Pete!

It’s not Eevee, it’s Cycles. I couldn’t get Eevee to show the wine inside the glass . I think it’s something to do with Light Probes and such. I haven’t been able to get it to work the way I want to. Here is the Eevee render:

I did generate the tablecloth using physics. I figured that either reducing the Collission object’s (table) outside outer thickness, or the Cloth’s Collission Distance would make the gap go away, but It didn’t, and when I reduced either or both of those parameters to their absolute minimum, the cloth would fly away or fold in on itself or downright disappear .

Interestingly enough, the gap doesn’t show up on the Eevee render, so maybe it’s got to do with ambient occlusion and how Cycles interprets shadows between two meshes that are very close together?

Thank you!

[FedPete]

Ah! you have the same problems I have in Eevee. I can show things inside the glass, but then other things are happening, see my old discussion Eevee glass and jagged lines, how to get rid of them

But also my study on fluids in glass using Cycles, see Why is glass and water so difficult?

[Uraboz]

Awesome! I just read through both of them.

After experimenting with transparency on Eevee, it’s apparent Glass BSDF won’t show transparent objects inside of itself.

Changed both Beaker and Liquid’s shader to Principled BSDF with full transmission, adjust refractive indexes a bit. On both shader’s I changed Blend Mode to Alpha Blend, enabled Show Backface, Screen Space Refraction and Subsurface Translucency. Given the Beaker’s dimensions, I had to set Refraction Depth to .001 meters. This is the result:

So at least the wine shows up now, but my beaker looks like very crude cut glass.

If I disable Backface Culling, this happens:

(Disregard the change in contrast. I disabled the compositing nodes)

So now we get good, smooth glass and crystalline wine, but the surface of the wine and the beaker’s mouth are now doing something that shouldn’t happen in our Universe’s physics.

From a distance, this render is actually very decent looking However, disabling Backface Culling creates a bunch of new problems, since the refraction of the materials used makes the glass and wine transmit light from inside of themselves outside. See what I mean:

[FedPete]

You made progress here!
Of course glass as a material is difficult for a speedy render type like Eevee. But must say your approach is very convincing.

, since the refraction of the materials used makes the glass and wine transmit light from inside of themselves outside

Maybe, it could be a Blender bug?

And deleting the bottom face, as seen in your last example could solve the problem.
Or assigning a different shader to this face with different ‘glas’ properties could do the trick.

So, maybe doing Eevee projects, without glass, could be also a solution
Of course it’s Eevee first appearance, maybe improvements will come in next releases.

Have fun!