Backwoods Distilling Whiskey

Overview

A set of photoreal renders of a Backwoods Distilling Co. whiskey bottle, made through 1509cgistudio. I built the bottle, label and stopper in Blender and staged them in two contrasting sets: a warm daylight scene with palms and citrus, and a dark scene on black rock.

The challenge

A whiskey bottle is mostly glass and liquid, and both are easy to get wrong in CG. The textured glass had to feel heavy and real, the spirit needed its deep red glow, and the black and teal foil label had to stay legible through all that refraction.

Approach

1. I modeled the bottle with a rippled, hammered glass surface, a wooden stopper and a teal neck seal. The diamond label is its own object, so it wraps the shoulder of the bottle cleanly.
2. I textured the label and stopper in Substance 3D Painter. The label pairs a matte black stock with metallic teal foil lettering, and the stopper keeps a light wood grain with small flecks.
3. The spirit is a separate material inside the glass. Rendered in Cycles, it bends the light through the bottle and throws a red glow onto the rock beneath it.
4. The daylight set puts a rippling caustic pattern on an olive wall, with palm fronds in the foreground and citrus on a black plinth. The dark set swaps that for glossy black rock, a soft monochrome backdrop and low, tilted camera angles.