Raise your glasses
How RPM created a range of photoreal alcoholic drinks bottles in a digital studio
This particular project for Diageo required the production of photorealistic renders of its almost endless array of spirits bottles: a collection of really stunning pieces of glassware that previously would have been shot in a photographic studio. “The one question mark was whether we could actually do it,” says Scott. “That formed the basis of our very simple but incredibly demanding brief – put next to a photographic equivalent, the 3D render was to be indistinguishable.”
“Working in Cinema 4D I started modelling, using technical drawings and blueprints from Diageo’s asset library as reference,” Scott continues. “Labels and graphics were applied using the print-ready artwork files supplied by Diageo. This is where the studio’s good print process knowledge comes in because the gold inks, foils, varnishes and embosses that make the labels look premium and rich are applied in a similar fashion, even using the choking, trapping and overprints a print designer will be familiar with.”
An animation pipeline
Knowing these would be rendered at a high resolution, attention to detail was paramount and all of the tiny imperfections and dimples, seams and registration marks in each bottle were faithfully recreated using displacement and bump maps. “The lighting rig for the bottles was particularly important because the bottles needed to sit next to a range of beautifully photographed drinks and cocktails, blending in seamlessly,” explains Scott. “At the photoshoot I took careful note of the camera and lighting so that a replica of the studio could be constructed in virtual space for our 3D bottles. All of this detail proved a real strain at render time and to achieve high-res results we used Cinema 4D’s NET Render to link up to six Mac Pro workstations and split the renders into a hundred tiles, and recompiled them in Photoshop afterwards. Even with this division of labour, typically more suited to animation, some of the most detailed bottles took two to three days to render. Results were intentionally muted and neutral giving our retouch team enough scope to adjust the colours and tones without having to re-render each time. A multi-pass render also allowed us to split the render into Photoshop layers. Refractions, reflections and shadows were all isolated for easier compositing in Photoshop.”
The end results are beautiful, realistic images of the bottles which can be re-imagined at any angle in any lighting scheme at any time. It’s an incredibly versatile way of generating imagery and the bottles can be used for any and all applications from high-res print output to an animated cinematic spot. See the advertising treatments and other projects at www.rpmltd.com