Bringing Out the Drama

When most people think of CGI images they think magical renders of perfect products where every detail pops out in just the right way. And while they're right, a great image can be magical, getting that magical image can be just as much work with a CGI image as it is with an image that starts with a photo.

Earlier this year Coca Cola called Bo Opfer, of 9k9, when they needed some high quality shots of their new bottle design for their NOS Energy Drink. Knowing this would need a touch of Photoshop Magic as well as CGI Magic Bo called on Dennis to be part of the team working on the project.

As you can see above these drinks come in 3 flavors, Fruit Punch (Red), Acai-Blueberry-Pomegranate (Blue), and Raspberry Lemonade (Pink). The overall job called for various views of each bottle with different lighting schemes. The shot you see above used the more dramatic lighting inspired by a Grolsch ad while the other shots used a more conventional product lighting scheme.

While we started out with a high quality 3D model as the project moved along it quickly became pretty clear we needed to modify some aspects of the model to get the clean look the client wanted. For instance the ribs that were on the back of the grip area of the bottle needed to be deleted, (they kept showing through).

And speaking of the ribs, as with conventional photos, often times the lighting that works great on one area may not bring out all the details you're looking for. Because the ribs were an important part of the redesign of the bottle we needed to make sure they popped in just the right way. But how to make this work without doing lots of illustrative work?

Enter the magical VRayNormals render! This is one of those really cool renders today's 3D programs can produce. Basically this pass (shown below) contains different lighting information. The rainbow look of the image comes from the differences in each of the Red, Green and Blue channels. And it was in those channels that Dennis found the perfect source for a mask that would let him make those ribs stand out.

As you can see the bottom of the bottles changed pretty dramatically over the life of the project. Seems the client decided to redesign the bottle of the bottles along the way (at least twice)! Combining this with various label changes, and the fact that each bottle needed to be rendered in both wet and dry versions (with the drops editable), you can see this was a pretty lengthy project.

Below are a Before/After look at the Blue bottle as well as one of the group shots with the more conventional lighting.